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news
Halfords (CC licensed image by John Parish:Flickr)Halfords wants to hire over 400 "cycling gurus" to boost its bike boom
Bike and car accessories retail chain Halfords has announced that it’s looking for 500 new staff, most of them in its cycling departments. And Halfords isn’t just looking for people to fly the tills; it wants “cycling gurus” to beef up its increasing success in bikes, parts and repairs.
No bike retailer gets people frothing at the mouth like Halfords. Mention the chain on a forum and you get a deluge of negativity, followed by a handful of people standing up for the company. Even Chris Boardman, who has sold an awful lot of bikes bearing his name through Halfords’ shops, concedes that their service has been “patchy”.
Fixing that was one of CEO Matt Davies’ main aims when he joined Halfords from Pets at Home in October 2012. A year later Retail Week was crediting Davies with improving efficiency, prioritising service and perhaps most importantly, recruiting the right people by using a new hiring system.
It appears to be working, as Halfords has today reported a 21.3 percent increase in the latest quarter’s like-for-like cycling sales, including a 35.1 percent increase in premium bike sales.
The figures follow a previous substantial increase in Halfords’ bike sales, with revenue growth of 14.2 per cent for the half-year to September 27, 2013.
Browsing the vacancies at www.halfordscareers.com reveals most of the over 400 cycling jobs on offer to be customer service and mechanic roles, predominantly part time, but with a smattering of full-time jobs in the mix too.
Jonathan Crookall, Halfords’ people director, said: “Cycling is at the heart of Halfords, and we’re enhancing our team with the biggest ever recruitment of cycling gurus for our stores. These 500 permanent roles will help us get even more of Britain cycling.”
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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17 comments
Having just popped along to my nearest Halfords to borrow a special BB tool which they allowed me to do (try that at your LBS) I enquired about this cycling guru position with regards to pay and was told by store manager £7.40 per hour.
I don't know many gurus but I don't think they will be interested, if you pay peanuts you end up employing monkeys.
It's a shame really, they are trying to do something about their rep but only half heartedly.
I'm quite sure you don't.
My biggest problem is their inability to answer the phone when I'm trying to buy something. Imagine how much more money they would make if they could master that basic principle. To be fair this probably reflects the skeleton staff they run with. So employing a few more staff & getting priorities right will make a world of difference
...
What I don't like about Halfords: http://rdrf.org.uk/2014/02/12/whats-wrong-with-halfords-cycling-top-tips/
So you don't like a piece of paper that they have printed.
Do you have any actual customer experiences or something relevant to this article to contribute?
If anything, the fact that they want to employ cycling guru's may suggest that they want to employ people to correct the literature they produce, customer experience etc. If so that is a positive thing. Why burden that positive move with your rantings?
Cycling to my local Halfords is not ideal as it's on an out of town shopping complex.
Not sure I understand you there? Bikes are allowed to go "out of town" too.
They'll get there. Having cycling people with passion instore is a good start.
There's a lot of tat in store but also a lot of decent, basic kit that you need to keep going.
I'm forever buying Clark's cables there in 3 for 2 offers so I can keep the bike looking good.
You have to admit that Halfords are 'on the march'. Bit of a 'chameleon' as a company and the shares are often tipped as a buy. I quite often find that if you need something quickly, they often have something in stock, unlike the LBSs, and they're open a bit later.
I wish Halfords would stock Quad Lock as its a great addition to anyones bike!
All for the better - more bikes sold and the cycling part of the store is at least visible to car drivers.
Though maybe they need to put up a picture in the assembly area... saw yet another Boardman yesterday with the fork turned the wrong way.
I was told by a Halfords worker (after bartering the massive web discount for a track pump in-store) that Halfords online is ran by a separate company to Halfords itself and actually has more to do with CRC. How true this is I don't know.
I'm in the pro-Halfords corner too. Ok, they probably wouldn't yet get my custom for service work (although this may change with this recruitment drive), and the in-store range is generally at the cheaper end of things, but they've got a large and respectable range of stuff online, and it's all well-priced (more so with the frequent flash sales and offers), and it's almost always available for next day click and collect. Only thing is that the range of actual bikes doesn't do it for me, so that's where the LBS still comes in.
I checked, nothing more than 16-20 hours per week, in my part of the world at least. Can I have 2 20 hour/week ones please?
Eventually, Halfords will be bikes only. The automobile side has decreased greatly. Seems like the obvious thing to do. Then they'll be as good as Evans.
I doubt it. The 3 stores in my area only have about one third of the floor space (probably less) dedicated to cycling. Even then cycling is always shoved upstairs on a mezzanine deck.
If you regularly spend significant money on cycling then I'd be surprised if you spent much of it, if any at all, at Halfords. It wouldn't even occur to me. I'm either at my LBS or on-line.
Hmm, not sure if I agree with that. My local independent bike shops get my business for big purchases like new bikes or stuff I can't do myself, like setting up wheels for instance. But Halfords is really useful for things like tyres for the MTB or brake cables and so on. There's also a decent range of stuff like locks at Halfords and we've had to replace two in the last few months (one lost key and one lock that fell off a carrier and wasn't noticed until it was too late).
I also bought the first two bikes my kids had in Halfords and they're still going strong, the Raleigh having been handed on to a friend for his two sons and now doing service as a club bike and the BMX now being used by the sister of a friend of my younger son. I've seen enough badly set up bikes bought from Halfords with the forks the wrong way round not to trust them completely, but Halfords isn't bad at being a mass market distributor.