Air New Zealand hiring hundreds of staff to avoid travel chaos hitting airlines

Air New Zealand is recruiting another 1100 staff to avoid the chaos suffered by some other airlines due to labour shortages.

The airline is building back to more than 10,000 staff — compared to 12,500
just before the pandemic — as travel recovers quickly with the removal of most border restrictions.

It is introducing a series of measures to attract workers. A bonus of up to $1400 is being paid to entice people to work for the airline’s airports division, where it is battling to find another 250 staff. Over the past year bonuses of $2400 have been paid to existing staff and incentive schemes for salary and unionised staff are being reintroduced.

The airline is also recruiting up to 700 cabin crew, primarily for its widebody international aircraft, 70 regional pilots and a further 100 people for its contact centre, where complex customer inquiries have pushed up wait times.

Air New Zealand chief people officer Nikki Dines said the airline was rebuilding at a carefully calibrated rate even though there was enough demand for more flights.

“The decision that we’ve made is that we will rebuild carefully. So rather than putting a whole lot of capacity on that we then have to cancel because we don’t have enough staff, we’re taking quite a cautious approach.”

Overseas, shortages of staff in airlines and airports have led to chaos, especially in the Northern Hemisphere summer holidays, as travel builds rapidly towards pre-pandemic levels. Thousands of flights put into the system have been cancelled even though passengers are paying high fares.

Dines said New Zealand’s lag behind he rest of the world in opening up had helped the airline’s response, although it had to react quickly to the announcement in March that the country would drop quarantine requirements for Australians from mid-April.

“It takes us about 12 weeks to really be able to restart the airline and obviously we didn’t get 12 weeks’ notice back in March; we got about four weeks’ notice the country was opening.”

The recruitment drive is nationwide. The biggest choke point at the moment is training.

“You can go out and recruit a bunch of people but then actually being able to put them through the system in terms of whether it’s pilots or cabin crew or contact centre, takes some time. The two big milestones for us are going into the July school holidays and making sure that we can increase capacity over that time. The next peak comes from October onwards.”

Unlike some workplaces, the airline was also building an additional buffer for sickness.

“We’re still seeing really high levels of sickness from Covid and the flu and other things. We’re just building quite a reasonable margin – we may have trainers who are out sick, then the whole system stalls.”

There were longer relief call lines to provide substitutes for crew or pilots who were sick, to ensure planes are kept flying.

She said on time performance (OTP) was looking good as there had been few cancellations.

A guessing game

Soon after the pandemic hit the airline in early 2020, job cuts came quickly and deeply. About 4000 staff were laid off or put on furlough as the airline was bleeding cash and struggling to stay afloat.

“We did what we thought we needed to do in the circumstances,” said Dines. “And this has been a guessing game for us the whole time.”

In December of 2020, the airline brought back more than 600 cabin crew to fly in the transtasman bubble but that only lasted a few months in the middle of 2021.

“We decided to keep those people on because we just didn’t know when borders would reopen. Although we kept them on with no flying to do for quite a period of time,” said Dines.

“We’re pleased now that we did that, because it’s enabling us to ramp up more quickly.”

Some people who had been paid redundancy had been hired back.

“That’s just how it works, that’s part of our contracts. It’s been part of what we offer for a very long time and that compensation is for them losing their role. For some people, it was only a very short period of time and they came back to us within a couple of months, and some people it’s been 18 months.”

Pay rates for some workers, especially those on lower wages, had gone up as much as 10 per cent over the past year as the airline competes in an increasingly tight labour market.

Staff travel was also a strong lure for staff, and had even more appeal now that the international network was expanding again.

The airline is also going through an organisational change to break down barriers between different work groups.

Air New Zealand was highly unionised, with 34 collective agreements, she said.

“They’ll [workers] come back if they’re in one of our unionised parts of the business, they come back…