John Lewis launches digital recruitment drive as e-sales surge

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
May 4, 2022

John Lewis Partnership has been diving deep into digital in recent years — both via its John Lewis department stores chain and its Waitrose supermarkets. And now it has announced that it’s recruiting for more than 150 roles as part of a big new investment in digital. 

The specialist roles “will play a major part in helping keep John Lewis and Waitrose the go-to brands for customers who want omnichannel access to quality, value and sustainability,” it said.

It added that “getting ever closer to customers online and being highly responsive to changing consumer habits are key to our future growth”. And to help with this it’s looking for “engineers to bring innovation and expertise across a range of technologies including Software, Cloud Platform, Native App, Data Engineers and Delivery Leads”.

Its Software Engineer and Delivery Lead roles will help to deliver customer-facing projects on both of its brands’ webstores that between them attract more than 55 million visits each month. 

It’s not that many years ago that John Lewis was being held up as a pioneer for the fact that 40% of its department store sales happened online. But e-sales now contribute to almost 70% of John Lewis chain sales and nearly a fifth of Waitrose sales. That 40% figure for the chain is a distant memory from two years ago, while Waitrose at the same point in time saw only 5% of sales happening digitally.

The company also said the new roles will support the growth and development of the Waitrose and John Lewis apps, which now account for almost a quarter of sales for the two brands.