With more than 500 days still to go before the start of the London Olympics, global delivery and logistics giant UPS is already gearing up its staffing operations to be ready for the world’s greatest sporting festival.

As the official logistics and delivery supplier to the London Olympics, UPS will be responsible for the pick-up and delivery of everything from documents to heavy freight.

Roger Mays, UPS’s HR manager for the UK, Ireland and the Nordics, told Recruiter that most of UPS’s recruitment needs would be short term temporary roles. “We will need to hire between 650 and 700 temporary staff, ” he says.  

Mays says his former workforce planning manager is already working at LOCOG, (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) where she is devising a plan for the deployment of UPS staff during the Olympics. 

Mays says a major challenge will be to back-fill the roles of between 50 and 100 of its existing staff, deployed to work at the Olympics for three months.

Mays adds that being awarded official supplier status “had not really had any effect on recruitment.” “We don’t get people coming up to us and saying, ‘you are the official logistics supplier, give me a job.’”

For more from Mays, see the new issue of Recruiter, out tomorrow.