Ikea kicks off hiring drive to find 400 staff for first NZ store
The Swedish furniture giant Ikea is starting its recruitment drive in New Zealand, by looking for the people and culture manager who will oversee the hiring of 400 people to run its 34,000m² Auckland mega store.
The Sylvia Park store is under construction and will be bigger than the average sized Ikea store globally. Ikea expects to bring in weekly, if not daily, shipments of its flat pack furniture and homeware products from Asia as the store opening nears.
As part of its push to find staff for the store, Ikea has erected a giant flatpack box kitset in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter.
Ikea New Zealand market manager Johanna Cederlöf said the company hoped to fill key management roles in the next few months before filling the majority of the 400 jobs next year in the lead up to the planned store opening in December.
The company wants to recruit most of the staff locally and reflect local diversity, said Cederlöf, who moved to New Zealand from Vienna two months ago.
She has been working at Ikea for 13 years and was earmarked to run the New Zealand business at that time. The culture manager role would have local job market experience and would lead the hiring of all staff, including key corporate roles, retail, sales, logistics, security, marketing and hospitality for the in-store restaurant.
“We will continue with the rest of steering group role recruitments, looking for other key positions, they will begin this year and after that we will follow with the second line managerial roles and specialist roles. In a year from now, we will then start doing recruitment for the rest of the organisation.”
Cederlöf said construction on the store was progressing on schedule.
Alongside building the store, development is under way for Ikea’s 20,000m² warehouse near Auckland Airport.
It has also been conducting market research to find out what New Zealand consumers may want to see stocked on the shelves of its store.
The three-level store will house at least two full-scale houses inside as part of its showroom displays, a Swedish restaurant and food market, and car parking on ground level.
A logistics expert said the size of the planned warehouse signalled that the furniture giant would probably open more than one store.
Ikea has previously signalled it would open another in the South Island.
Ikea Australia and New Zealand market expansion manager Fabian Winterbine previously said for a store the size planned for Auckland, Ikea typically held anywhere between six and 10 weeks worth of stock, more for best-selling items such as the popular Billy book cases.
Most stock would come from China or Malaysia, where it was made and the company had distribution centres, Winterbine said. Container shipments would arrive “almost every day, certainly every week”.
Recent drone footage from the construction site shows 500 seismic piles have been sunk into the ground, some as deep as 50 metres, to support the building.
Deep drainage trenches, horizontal foundations are under construction and the first steel columns are now visible above the ground.
Ikea operates 400 stores worldwide, including 10 in Australia, where it has been operating for almost 50 years. The retailer had been teasing a launch in New Zealand for years and first confirmed its intentions to set up shop at an event at Auckland’s The Cloud in early 2019.