Logistics company Radial said Tuesday that it is hiring up to 4,000 people to help handle holiday packages at its Locust Grove fulfillment center.
Although hiring for the Christmas rush at the 750,000-square-foot facility, the company expects to eventually give more than one-third of the seasonal employees full-time, permanent jobs, said Eric Narvaez, the site director.
The Henry County facility, which operates around the clock, receives, warehouses and then directs packages to consumers, but does not do the deliveries itself. All the goods coming to the center come from one retail client, but Radial declined to name the retailer.
Radial is a Pennsylvania-based subsidiary of Bpost, Belgium’s main mail delivery company.
The company joins a number of others that are competing for blue-collar workers in the U.S. With job openings plentiful and applicants often scarce, some businesses have raised pay and offered various benefits to attract more candidates.
Narvaez declined to declined to say how much the Radial jobs pay, but said pay would be competitive with similar positions at other large companies like Home Depot and Amazon.
“We are still dialing into what the seasonal wages will be,” he said. “But we are very in tune to the market. And we are competing with everybody else.”
Several weeks ago, e-commerce giant Amazon said it was raising its average starting pay to $18 an hour. Earlier this month it said it plans to hire about 5,000 more workers across metro Atlanta, including hundreds at its Stone Mountain facility, the largest in the metro area.
Sandy Springs-based package delivery giant UPS recently said it plans to hire 100,000 seasonal workers, including nearly 2,340 positions in metro Atlanta, as it prepares for the busy holiday shipping period.
Georgia has experienced rapid growth in warehouses and fulfillment centers in recent years, fueled in part by the surge in e-commerce. Many of the facilities ring metro Atlanta as businesses try to speed up deliveries to consumers.
Radial expects to offer a number of incentives to workers, including overtime pay, Narvaez said. “It’s not all about the wage.”
Positions include some white-collar office employees, but are mostly for people who handle materials on the warehouse floor, he said.
Radial also has a 97-employee center in Buford, which handles a different, similarly anonymous client.
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