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Hannaford Plans To Hire More Than 2,000 Employees To Keep Up With Demand Caused By Coronavirus

Willis Ryder Arnold
/
Maine Public File
Hannaford is planning to hire more than 2,000 workers across New England and New York to keep up with increased demand caused by COVID-19.

Hannaford is planning to hire more than 2,000 workers across New England and New York to keep up with increased demand caused by COVID-19.

That comes on top of the 2,200 workers that the Scarborough-based grocery chain has already hired since mid-March.

Scott LeClair, the grocery chain's director of talent development, says many of the new hires will help the company to expand its "Hannaford To Go" online curbside pickup service, which he says has been overloaded with demand since the pandemic began.

“People were actually getting up at midnight to try to get slots for the next day, and they're gone in, like, 10 minutes,” LeClair says. “We do have a limited offering right now, basically just because of staffing issues. We were able to successfully bump it up more so, already. And we want to go a lot further with it.”

The company says it is also working with other businesses, such as restaurants, to hire furloughed workers on a temporary basis.

“We're hiring full-time, part-time, and temp workers — just for people that are furloughed, that might want to go back to their regular job when it opens up. So we'll hire somebody for 90 days, with no commitment beyond that, if that's something they're interested in doing.”

LeClair estimates that at least 40 percent of the new hires would be in Maine.