Recruiting for Christmas

Our drive to recruit around 33,000 temporary workers to help sort the Christmas post this year, is now underway.

More Christmas shopping will be done online than on the high street for the first time this year. With customers expected to do most, if not all, their 2020 Christmas shopping online, the considerable logistical feat of processing and delivering the festive mailbag means we’ll be taking on more additional workers over the festive season than the total number of people in the Royal Navy (over 30,000), Transport for London (around 28,000) or the BBC (around 24,000).

Temporary positions across a variety of shifts will be available, from late October through to early January 2021. The peak of the additional temporary work will be in our busiest month of December.

Parcelforce Worldwide is also looking for drivers and indoor workers as we gear up to deliver a record number of parcels this Christmas.

Helping to sort the post

Royal Mail has been recruiting festive temporary workers since the Second World War. Over 13,000 people are needed to work in mail centres, distribution centres and data centres across England. There are also around 1,400 posts in Scotland, 700 jobs in Wales and another 500 roles in Northern Ireland.

The temporary recruits will help to sort Christmas parcels and cards as well as the growing amount of online shopping orders before they are taken to around 1,400 delivery offices for our people to take out on their rounds.

There are also an additional 18,000 workers required across the following areas:

• 7,200 temporary vacancies in our logistic arm operation.
• 5,000 delivery drivers to support the seasonal uplift via our agency suppliers.
• 2,000 roles in Parcelforce Worldwide.
• 1,800 roles at Heathrow Worldwide Distribution Centre (HWDC).
• 1,000 jobs in our dedicated Covid-19 testing kit collection team.
• 750 data inputting roles in three sites in the UK.

Dedicated website

We have set up a dedicated website for people to apply for these Christmas positions, visit https://christmasrecruitment.royalmailgroup.com/, email Christmas_helpline@royalmail.com or call our automated helpline on 0345 600 1785.

Chief HR Officer, Sally Ashford, said: ‘During these unprecedented times we believe it is critical that Royal Mail continues to deliver. We want to do our best to deliver Christmas for our customers and support the effort on the pandemic. This helps the whole country to celebrate and stay safe during these difficult times.’