As part of its extensive growth strategy, T&G Global today announced it is recruiting 150 permanent positions across its apple operations.
T&G Global Director Operations, Craig Betty, says the creation of these new permanent roles demonstrates T&G’s commitment to continuing to expand its apples business to meet global demand, and provide career opportunities to existing talent within the business, as well as to people in the wider community.
“Our apples business has an ambitious growth strategy in place to grow our premium Envy™ and JAZZ™ apple brands to meet worldwide demand. To achieve this vision, it’s critical we have a talented, passionate and supported team who are empowered to be their best,” says Craig.
“Despite our very best efforts to recruit locally last year, the 2020/21 season was extremely challenging, with limited availability of skilled people ready to work in the regions, combined with a reduced number of Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) team members. The new roles we’re creating have been developed to help us deliver on our future growth objectives, whilst also helping retain our existing talent and provide people with an opportunity to further build their skills and capabilities within our operations.”
The 150 new permanent roles are being advertised internally amongst T&G’s casual and contracted seasonal workforce, as well as externally in the local community. Those employed in the roles will move through harvest and post-harvest roles and will develop a thorough understanding of both operational and growing processes. This will include spending time developing T&G’s 2D orchards as part of the company’s pathway to automation.
“Across our growing operations, we’re re-developing our orchards to 2D planting structures to support the efficient use of automation and robotics in the future. We’re committed to our roadmap to automation and continually optimising our supply chain to increase productivity. By ensuring we have skilled team members in our operations, we’ll be able to help fast-track this process.”
Craig says although the roles will provide support at the peak of the apple season, T&G will still need to recruit thousands of people nationwide for the upcoming season. “Recruitment remains a critical focus for the upcoming 2021/22 season. This season our team did an incredible job hiring more than 950 New Zealanders to work alongside a reduced number of RSE team members. However, at the peak of the season we were still short around 300 people per day which meant we left a significant amount of fruit on trees.
“With these new positions, we expect our productivity to increase as we build our team’s skills and capabilities, however we’ll still require additional seasonal team members to join us throughout the harvest.”
T&G is underway offering existing seasonal team members the opportunity to apply, as well as looking externally to fill the 150 positions.v
