Southwest Airlines’ next CEO said an application to work at Whataburger was stapled to his food bag: ‘That’s what it’s come to’

  • Date: 24-Sep-2021
  • Source: Business Insider
  • Sector:Transport
  • Country:Jordan
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Southwest Airlines’ next CEO said an application to work at Whataburger was stapled to his food bag: ‘That’s what it’s come to’

A is hitting businesses across the nation, and it's affecting everyone from Southwest Airlines' incoming CEO to the staff at his local Whataburger. Robert Jordan, who will take the helm of Southwest early next year, discussed the nation's labor shortage during an interview on Thursday. In order to fill vacant positions, many businesses have resorted to new tactics, like or . Others are trying something a little more unusual. Jordan described visiting a Dallas-area Whataburger drive-thru, a Texas-based hamburger chain. When he was handed his bag of food, he realized there was something stapled to it: a job application. "They are stapling a job application to the sack of food that every single person coming through the drive-thru gets and you go:'That's what it's come to,'" Jordan said. "It has become, to me, sort of the symbol of the job market that we live in here — there's so much competition." A spokesperson for Whataburger did not respond to Insider's request for comment on its hiring tactics. But much like that Dallas Whataburger, Southwest is having trouble attracting applicants, Jordan said. Southwest is hiring 5,000 new employees this fall and another 8,000 in 2022, but the applications haven't been flooding