Recruiting distribution center staff - Hiring to keep, in a sector where turnover is the real problem

A distribution centre rarely suffers from a lack of applications. The halls keep getting bigger, volumes climb, and every new site needs hundreds of people within months. Even so, logistics employers almost always name recruiting distribution center staff as their hardest problem. Not because nobody applies, but because the people who walk in tend to walk out again just as fast.

That makes this a different question than it looks. Focus only on the front end and you keep running campaigns to fill a leak. Look at the whole chain, from the first ad to the third month on the floor, and the number of applicants is rarely the issue. This piece is built on the belief that sits underneath all of our logistics work: you recruit in order to keep people.

Why does recruiting distribution center staff so often stall?

The numbers are blunt. The World Economic Forum pointed to research by Fountain putting 2025 turnover at 73 percent in logistics and warehousing, against 81 percent in retail and 87 percent in quick service restaurants. Gallup estimates that replacing a frontline employee costs roughly 40 percent of an annual salary. Put those together and you see what really happens in a DC with three hundred people. You are not recruiting, you are topping up.

The encouraging part sits in the same research. Harvard Business School found that 42 percent of people who left voluntarily said afterwards that their employer could have prevented it. So close to half of your turnover is not a law of nature but the result of choices made long before anyone resigned.

In the Netherlands, a tight market sits on top of that. Sector body STL counted around 11,000 open vacancies for logistics staff and transport planners in the third quarter of 2025, while the workforce keeps ageing: the share of employees aged 65 and over grew from 0.7 to 5.1 percent since 2011. Much of that inflow comes from retail, so you are not only competing with the DC down the motorway.

Who are you actually looking for, and what do they look at?

We start with the talent, not with the employer. That sounds obvious and it rarely happens. A 22 year old order picker leaving hospitality for something steadier, a forklift driver with ten years behind him, and a team leader who grew into the role internally have almost nothing in common. They still get the same ad, the same imagery and the same promise about an informal atmosphere.

What they do share: they orient themselves on a phone, often outside office hours, and they decide on a handful of hard facts. Travel time. Shift patterns. What an evening or a weekend actually pays. Whether a bus runs at half past five. Those are not details for the bottom of the vacancy. They are the vacancy.

Research beats brainstorming here. Ask people who just started what tipped the balance, and people who left within six months what disappointed them. Those two conversations tell you more than six months of campaign data. We wrote about why we always begin on that side in start with the talent, not with yourself.

Why is an honest picture of the work your best filter?

Warehouse work is physical, it runs at pace, and the first weeks are heavy. Leaving that out of your campaign delivers exactly the applicants you do not want. You want to attract talent, but the right talent. Someone who starts on a flattering story and quits after three weeks costs you more than someone who never applied.

Research into realistic job previews, summarised in the 2011 meta-analysis by Earnest, Allen and Landis, is honest about the size of the effect on retention: modest. The mechanism is the interesting part. What works is not that people lower their expectations, but that they come to see the organisation as honest. Trust is the active ingredient.

In practice: film the floor as it is, at six in the morning, with the sound left in. Let someone say what they underestimated in week one. A careers site that shows the real work does two jobs at once. It attracts, and it filters.

What happens in the first ninety days?

The candidate journey does not end at the signature. In logistics a large share of turnover sits right at the start: people who never show up on day one, or who stop after three weeks because nobody noticed they were there.

Recruiting in order to keep people means treating onboarding as part of the recruitment budget. A named buddy. A team leader who asks how it is going on day three and has the time to listen. Clarity about what happens after three months. It sounds small, and it moves your turnover number faster than any ad will.

At a client like Picnic that thinking sits in the structure. The Picnic Academy makes training a fixed part of the job rather than something you get to when things are quiet. It is less visible than a campaign, and it does more for whether someone is still there in a year.

Why is the shift roster a brand promise?

You buy a product, but a job comes home with you. People working rotating shifts build a family, a study or a second job around that roster. A schedule that only lands on Thursday is not a planning detail then. It is a promise you break every week.

This is not a soft observation. In a randomised experiment at Gap, run by researchers from UNC Kenan-Flagler, UC Hastings and the University of Chicago across 28 stores, more stable scheduling produced 7 percent higher sales and 5 percent higher labour productivity. Retail is not a distribution centre, but the mechanism is the same: predictability pays, on the balance sheet too.

For your employer brand there is something uncomfortable in that. You cannot promise reliability in a campaign if your planning does not deliver it. The promise has to be kept by real people, or your marketing works against you. We go into how brand and vacancy relate to each other in employer branding and vacancies.

How do you turn progression into a recruitment argument?

The assumption that warehouse work is a stopgap job comes from employers more often than from employees. A study Researchscape carried out for Kahoot among 1,626 frontline workers in transportation, distribution and storage in the United States found that 64 percent would stay longer, by up to six years, given better training and guidance.

Gartner earlier found that 81 percent of employees want to learn skills they can use in their work, but that only 42 percent found those opportunities easy to find. In many organisations the offer already exists. It is just invisible.

That is a communications problem, which makes it yours. Show what the order picker of three years ago is doing now. Name the route to a forklift certificate, to team leader, to planner. With names and dates, instead of a line about plenty of room to grow.

What do you measure to know whether it works?

First the question, then the solution. Before a campaign exists, we fix which number has to move. Time from application to first shift. No-shows on day one. Turnover in the first ninety days. Or simply the number of shifts left unfilled.

Without a baseline you cannot show anything afterwards, and that is not just a measurement problem but a support problem. The operations manager who has to free up budget again next year needs a number, not a nice film.

And sometimes the answer is not a campaign at all. An application process that drops from eleven days to two, or a careers site that finally works properly on a phone, tends to deliver more than extra media spend.

How does MonFri approach recruiting distribution center staff?

We start with the people you are looking for, not with the brand. A baseline measurement, then a look at where the funnel leaks, then content made on the floor with your own employees. Media comes after that. And what we build has to still work in February, when the peak is over and nobody is thinking about recruitment.

Curious what that means for your site? Have a look at our services, or call us on 020 23 38 587. Email works too, at hi@mon-fri.com.