Cornwall-based St Austell Brewery has launched Pub Flex, a new app-based inclusive and flexible careers scheme. The company, which operates 180 pubs and hotels across the South West, is one of the region’s largest employers and has designed the app to improve its careers offer post-pandemic.
Pub Flex hopes to attract new workers by offering shifts and hours that suit people of all ages, skill sets and backgrounds. There are no minimum number of hours per week or month required and shifts are posted as soon as they are available. All roles, which take in front-of-house, supporting kitchen crews and housekeeping teams, pay £9.50 per hour and can be signed up for on employees’ smartphones in seconds.
Tamsyn Allington, communications and people director at St Austell Brewery, said: “We acknowledge that the way we all work has vastly changed in the last 50 years, and covid only accelerated that change. Post-pandemic, it’s so important for hospitality businesses like us to offer balance, tangible benefits and genuine flexibility, as well as career paths for those who want to progress in the industry. Young people coming into the hospitality sector continue to be essential, but there are so many other groups of people who would be great employees, such as retirees looking for a new challenge or a bit of extra income.
“Once you experience hospitality, even in the toughest of times, it is an industry you passionately fall in love with. That’s what keeps people there – it’s the buzz, the energy, the incredible diversity of customers and experiences you can have. Having the chance to introduce such a phenomenal industry to work in, at a pace to suits everybody, will hopefully slowly build towards hospitality being a more desired industry for people to enter into.”
