Store Roles
Click here for store case studies
If you’ve ever been to a Pets at Home store you’ll know that they are a retail dream, full of natural theatre. From the bright, colourful, vibrant aquatics displays to the focal point of most stores, the Bunny Village, our stores are literally alive with activity and excitement. Our new look stores launched in 2006 and now being rolled out across the country add to this theatre through the use of colours and striking imagery. While other businesses talk of creating retail theatre, our shops come with it as standard.
However, working in the UK’s best specialist retailer and being a leading pet care authority is not without its responsibilities. Our customers’ needs are demanding after all they are coming to us for advice about a much loved family member, their pet. Our customers want to deal with people that they can trust, people who are knowledgeable when it comes to the care and welfare of their much loved pets and at the same time people who are approachable, friendly and can interact with them as well as their animals.
Whilst a love of animals is essential, you will probably find that the knowledge that you have gained as a pet owner, now or in the past, combined with our industry leading training provided by the Pets at Home Academy will mean that you are soon able to advise and assist a wide range of customers. If you have a wider animal related interest or qualification, all the better, as we offer chances for you to use your experience in a commercial environment and even possibly build on this through the Pets at Home Academy.
But, do not be fooled! Although animals are at the heart of what we do and what we are about, Pets at Home retail is Hands On Retail. We are different to other retailers because we sell pets as well as products but the general experience gained in other quality retailers will still apply and help you make a smooth transition. At Pets at Home, if you join us as a Store Colleague or a Store Manager your aims will be the same. You’ll do everything you can to exceed our customers’ expectations, you’ll deal with their requests, pamper their pets and process their sales. You’ll ensure our pets are clean, fed and looked after to the highest possible standards. You’ll make sure our stores are clean and well presented with stock faced up and deliveries processed to ensure that stock is available as and when our customers want it. It’s hard work but we take pride in exceeding our customers’ expectations.
Life as a Store Colleague
As a Store Colleague, your role will be split across three areas: people, product and pets. The most important of these is people. Your main job will be to interact with our customers (and their pets as they are welcome in our stores as well). You will need to be able to find out what our customers need, advise them accordingly and offer them a suitable product from our extensive range. You will need to laugh with our customers when they share their funny pet stories with you but be sympathetic when sad things happen as they sometimes do.
As we know, you can not offer great service if you do not have great product and much of your time as a Store Colleague will be spent handling product. You may receive anything from 3 to 6 deliveries a week and all of this product needs to be taken off a lorry at the rear of the store and placed immaculately on a fixture at the front of the store. This is hard work but it is fundamental in offering our customers the service that they expect. On the plus side, it will keep you fit.
Finally, there are the pets and whilst they may be last they are definitely not least. Most of our cleaning out and welfare checks are carried out at the start of the day so if you are on shift then, you will definitely be involved. However, selling a pet is a big responsibility and takes time. You need to have the confidence to handle the animals, advise our customers and make sure that the right customer ends up with the right pet. Of course we also welcome pets into our stores so some times accidents happen!!!
Life as an Assistant Manager or Deputy Manager
As an Assistant Manager or Deputy Manager, as with all our colleagues, your role will be split across three areas: people, product and pets. Much of your role, on a daily basis, will be the same as our store colleagues in that you will expected to interact and advise our customers, work the product to ensure our stores are fully stocked and immaculately presented and take care of the pets, both those in our stores and those in our customers’ homes through the provision of outstanding customer care. We are after all The Hands on Retailer.
However, as an Assistant or Deputy Manager, these three areas come with more responsibility as you would expect as a member of the store management team. With people, you will also need to help manage your team, train them and give them feedback both good and bad. You will need to help celebrate your teams’ successes but give them clear direction when things go wrong. With product, you will get involved with stock control, ensuring that the procedures are in place to guarantee an accurate stock file at all times, thereby ensuring product availability and presenting our customers with the widest possible choice. Finally with pets you will grow your own knowledge so that you can support, advise and train your store team. You will also ensure that our process and procedures are strictly adhered to not only comply with legislative requirements but more importantly to guarantee the highest possible standards of care for the animals in our stores.
An Assistant Manager at Pets at Home, is the more junior role, ideally suited to someone looking for their first management position, perhaps having been a supervisor in a previous role. This may also suit someone who has a wide knowledge of animals, either informally or through qualification but who lacks broader management experience. As the title suggests, as Deputy Manager, you will deputise for the Store Manager in all areas of the store, probably joining us with some previous management experience. For people with the ambition to progress, joining as a Deputy Manager is an ideal way to gain experience of working with pets and working at Pets at Home before taking on the responsibility of a store of your own. With both of these roles, there will be times when as duty manager you have full responsibility for the store, the team and our customers. We will give you all the training and support you could need and if you give us your commitment and enthusiasm, the career potential is enormous.
Life as a Store Manager or Store Manager Designate
If you are the type of Store Manager that likes to create business plans and strategies for your store and implements through tiered delegation, then you are probably not right for Pets at Home and we will not be right for you. If you are the type of Store Manager that believes your natural habitat is your shop floor, leading your team from the front, spotting sales opportunities, maintaining and developing exceptional presentation standards, mucking in to get the job done and most importantly speaking to hundreds of your customers throughout the week, serving them and learning from them, then you will love Pets at Home and we will want to hear from you. We are after all The Hands on Retailer.
Of course as Store Manager, you have ultimate accountability for your stores’ performance and KPIs. You will be required to complete a number of management functions including planning, project roll outs, floor relays, completing colleague appraisals etc. However, at Pets at Home, we like to keep things simple and we believe that a Store Manager adds most value when they are working front of house, leading, training and coaching their team where the real work happens, in front of our customers.
Your aim as a Pets at Home Store Manager will be to ensure that your store achieves the 5 Key Objectives:
- Maximise Sales
- Provide excellent customer service
- Achieve excellent presentation standards
- Be the leading pet care authority
- Live the company values
Our stores turnover £millions, you may be surprised! We are constantly innovating and changing our product ranges to exceed our customers’ needs, which of course creates work in stores. We host school trips and educational sessions teaching tomorrow’s pet owners about responsible pet ownership. We offer exceptional training to all of our colleagues which needs to be planned and delivered. We help each other out in other stores across the areas, in short, there is always something going on.
As a Store Manager Designate, your role is exactly as described above but with the added complication of travelling across a number of stores in a geographical area to help support your colleagues wherever the need arises and whatever that need may be. The aim ultimately will be to find you a store of your own that matches your skills, aspirations and personal circumstances but in the meantime, you will gain invaluable experience seeing what works (and what doesn’t) in Pets at Home stores across the business.
To join us as Store Manager or Store Manager Designate you will have been a Store Manager from a mid sized retailer or perhaps a Department / Section manager from a larger retailer where customer service excellence, team leadership, stock management and high presentation standards come as standard.
Life as an Aquatics Manager
This is a truly unique role for truly unique people.
In 2006, we opened our first Aquatics super centre on a 3,000 sq ft mezzanine in our Crayford store. We are opening 4 more in 2007 with plans for many more across the country over the coming years. In these Aquatics Centres we offer an unrivalled range of fish, tanks and accessories to cater for fish keepers of all ages and experience. From goldfish through to marine fish, from novice to expert, from £9 first aquarium to £9,000 marine set up these shops sell it all and if Crayford is anything to go by, people will travel for miles and miles to benefit from our range but more importantly benefit from our expertise.
As Aquatics Manager, you will report to the Pets at Home Store Manager but have responsibility for the Aquatics offer in store and the Aquatics experts in your team. The store fit out in these locations is stunning and the product range second to none but far more important is the level of expertise, knowledge and support you and your team will offer our customers.
You will first and foremost be an Aquatics Fanatic with an extensive knowledge of fish keeping of all sorts but especially Marine fish and marine environments. This knowledge may have been gained through years of fish keeping yourself but is more like to come from working in this industry before or gaining a qualification in your subject. However, knowledge is only useful, if you can share it and you must also have the interpersonal skills that will allow you to one minute sell a goldfish starter kit to a family looking for their first pet and the next sell marine products to a customer who has as much knowledge as you yet both sets of customers must leave our stores feeling special.
If you would like to be a part of one of the most exciting developments in Aquatics retailing then we would love to hear from you, even if you can not see a vacancy in your area because even if there is not one now, there may be some soon.