Majestic Wine

Majestic is the UK’s largest specialist wine retailer. Majestic began in London more than 40 years ago and today has more than 200 stores nationwide. Majestic prides itself on its friendly, expert colleagues both in the Support Centre and Majestic stores – a key strength is over 1,000 Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) trained colleagues, offering knowledgeable service across all channels. In fact, Majestic is one of Europe’s biggest wine educators.

Each year the company recruits over 200 people; a mixture of full time and part time employees to help Majestic during the busiest seasons especially Christmas, its busiest time of the year. Full time and part time employees ensure that customers are served quickly during peak periods to ensure customers have a fantastic, personalised experience in store – whether that’s through their in-store tasting counters, expert recommendations, a no-quibble refund guarantee, free glass hire, a carry-to-car service and much more.

Business need

As the talent market has become competitive, the Talent Team at Majestic’s top priority is to continue finding great people to join its growing business. All retail employees are recruited directly by the Majestic Talent Team to work in one of Majestic’s 200+ retail stores across the UK. Prior to using TrustID, Right to Work (RtW) checks, a legal requirement, were carried out manually in the stores. While this gave managers autonomy over the process, it was a major administrative task which took up a lot of time and could have created a compliance risk.

Solution

Lily De Franca, Head of Talent Acquisition and Retention at Majestic Wine was keen to bring the company’s Right to Work compliance under one solution and contacted TrustID for help.

“Compliance is hugely important at Majestic. As a recruiter, we have an important role to play in preventing illegal working by undertaking simple checks on the right to work in the UK for all new starters.

Each store across the UK, alongside the Talent Team, has the overall responsibility for hiring, but the store managers aren’t compliance experts and we needed a solution that could be fluid enough to work our way and support our managers when recruiting regionally. TrustID offers a genuinely good service, I don’t think you could find any better.”

TrustID’s Right to Work (RtW) service gives Majestic Wine’s store managers a document checking tool of their own which they use to validate identity documents either via an app or from their desks back in the office. The service has removed the administration overhead for store managers and reduced the time it took to carry out checks from between one and four days to under an hour.

Protection

Majestic Wine is a much-loved brand and has a reputation it is keen to protect. A good employee experience is a key part of the brand. Majestic’s interview and recruitment process is praised in Glassdoor reviews, with 86% saying it was a positive experience and many people mentioning how smooth and easy the process was. Majestic was voted 19th Best place to work in the UK 2021.

As Lily De Franca explains, “We want to offer the best experience and a very fluid process for all our new starters. We would never want to have to reverse a job offer because the right checks weren’t done at the right time, but we do have to protect the business and carry them out compliantly.”

Majestic Wine carries out the Right to Work checks at the final stage interview and can get a quick answer, which helps to prevent losing a promising candidate to a competitor.

Lily continues, “The TrustID service means we can make checks quickly and efficiently and enable us to continue delivering a great experience to our new starters. Our store managers absolutely love it, and it gives us complete peace of mind that the business is protected.”

Conclusion

Majestic Wine’s decision to use TrustID’s RtW service has given the company peace of mind about the compliance of its recruitment process. It also helps improve the candidate experience and reduce the administrative burden on store managers who can focus on the important job of selling wine!