West Auckland butcher says meat-packer opening drew more than 1,000 applications

Aussie Butcher in New Lynn, West Auckland, received more than 1,000 CVs after advertising for a full-time staff member, managing director Reuben Sharples told RNZ in a report published on 12 October 2026. The meat-packer opening drew applicants with experience well beyond the role, he said, giving one employer an unusually large pool to assess while New Zealand’s latest official figures show unemployment had risen earlier in the year.

How the New Lynn applications arrived

Sharples told RNZ’s Morning Report that he first saw about 120 emails from applicants. Administrative staff then told him roughly 870 more applications had come through SEEK. Applications were still arriving when he spoke to the programme. Those figures, as reported by Sharples, explain how the total passed 1,000; RNZ did not provide a separate tally from the employer’s records.

The volume left him unsure how to deal with the response, Sharples said. It also brought applicants whose work histories were far from the advertised meat-packer role. He cited a person with 20 years of aviation security experience, several people who had worked in rest homes and a computer engineer. His account describes the range of people who applied; it does not establish why each person sought the job.

Some candidates had skill sets ‘10, 20 times’ what the job required, Sharples said. He told RNZ the pool was so broad that it could have enabled him to start other businesses. The remark conveys his reaction to the applications, rather than a plan to open another business. The report gives no breakdown of applicants’ qualifications, employment status or reasons for applying.

What Sharples said about hiring

Sharples also offered advice to younger people looking for work. He encouraged them to use friends’ and family networks, keep applying and present themselves positively. He advised against arriving with parents. Those suggestions were his response to the experience at his butcher’s shop; the interview did not measure whether any particular approach improved an applicant’s chances in this hiring round.

How the applicant surge compares with national figures

Stats NZ’s latest published quarterly labour-market release puts the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate at 5.6% for the June 2026 quarter, up from a revised 5.4% in March. It counted 171,000 unemployed people in June. The release was published on 5 August, before Sharples’s October interview, so it provides a national snapshot from an earlier period rather than a count of people seeking this particular job.

The same Stats NZ release put the June-quarter underutilisation rate at 13.8%, up from 12.9% in March, and the employment rate at 66.7%. Underutilisation is a broader labour-market measure than unemployment. Together, the reported figures show pressure in the national market during June, but they cannot establish that a four-figure response to one West Auckland advertisement was typical across employers or occupations.

For people aged 15 to 24, Stats NZ reported a seasonally adjusted rate of 13.8% who were not in employment, education or training in June, compared with 14.4% in March. That youth measure gives context to Sharples’s advice for younger jobseekers. It does not identify the ages of those who applied to Aussie Butcher or show how many of them were out of work.

The figures and the interview answer different questions. Sharples’s account describes the response to his advertisement and the hiring decision he says followed. Stats NZ measures the labour market across the country for an earlier quarter. Neither source establishes how many applicants were unemployed, whether they lived in West Auckland or how many similar vacancies drew comparable interest. The reported application total remains Sharples’s account.