Closing date - 14 September 2026
Salary - £13.45 per hour (Manchester Real Living Wage)
Please feel free to contact us at recruitment@factoryinternational.org if you require any support in completing your application
Visitor Team Host Job Pack - download here
Visitor Team Host Application questions - download here
Our Visitor Team Hosts are central to creating great experiences for all visitors to Aviva Studios, the home of Factory International; as well as at events further afield as part of Manchester International Festival (MIF). Our Visitor Team is versatile – supporting events across a range of different art forms, community-focused sessions, big music gigs, as well as commercial hires.
The key responsibilities for the Visitor Team Host include;
- Provide outstanding customer care to all visitors including a generous and attentive welcome, identifying and responding to differing customer needs and interests.
- Support and facilitate the day-to-day operations of the venue – involving:
o Ushering
o Stewarding
o Cloakroom operating
o Invigilation
o Ticket-checking and scanning
o Crowd and queue management
o Operating retail and merchandise points, taking payments and cash handling
o Working collaboratively with other teams across Factory International.
- Operating accessibility provisions and responsibilities, such as accessible viewing platforms, access lifts and accessible seating arrangements, ensuring to provide a high quality and inclusive experience to all visitors.
- Be a part of the leading team which responds to incidents and manages health & safety escalation. This involves calmly and assertively responding to incident alarms, evacuations, event pauses, stops, etc.
- Support the preparation and presentation of spaces for events and activities and help visitors, staff, and artists to enjoy, interact with, and be creative in our spaces (some manual handling may be required).
- Work with the Visitor Safety/Security Team to monitor and maintain the safety of visitors and respond to visitor and staff concerns, making use of escalation and reporting procedures as needed.
- Champion equality, diversity, and inclusion in your work and in the regard which you extend to all visitors.
The person specification for the Visitor Team Host are;
ESSENTIAL
- Empathetic and generous approach to communication, as well as commitment and desire to provide great experiences for visitors.
- Excited about working with a wide variety of different audiences and events – from community-focused sessions in the social to all night raves in the warehouse, this role will involve supporting events across Music, Theatre, Performance, Visual Art, Public Engagement, and Commercial Hires.
- Positive and proactive, with a desire to learn and develop new skills.
- Ability to work under pressure at busy events – working collaboratively as part of a team.
- Available to work flexibly across various working hours, including evenings and weekends.
- Commitment to championing representation and inclusion at every level of the organisation with a proven ability to work with people from a wide range of backgrounds.
- Willing to complete relevant statutory checks e.g. DBS (Factory International can support with processing and payment)
DESIRABLE
- Previous experience of working in a customer-facing environment. (e.g., retail, education, hospitality, events etc.)
- Familiarity with Health & Safety legislation as well as a practical knowledge of policies and procedures and how to work safely within them.
- First Aid training.
- Knowledge of languages in addition to English, including British Sign Language (BSL)
- Enthusiasm for training, mentoring and support of emerging talent
When applying please do not rely solely on ChatGPT/AI software for your answers as it may not fully reflect your skills and experience and how they align with this role and we may decide to discount your answer if we believe it is solely generated by AI.
Inventing tomorrow together. New art and music – at our venue Aviva Studios, online, across our city, around the world and at Manchester International Festival.
Factory International will commission, produce and present an ambitious year-round programme of original creative work, music and special events by leading artists from across the globe.
Drawing on MIF's track record for premiering bold productions that defy convention, artists will be encouraged to create work in new ways, to collaborate across disciplines and blur the boundaries between art and popular culture.
Built with flexibility in mind, the design of our venue Aviva Studios is led by Ellen van Loon of the world-leading practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). The 13,350 square-metre venue is based around large, open, ultra-flexible spaces that can be constantly reconfigured, enabling large-scale artistic work of invention and ambition that isn’t possible anywhere else in the world.
The organisation will continue to stage MIF every other year, at Factory International and other venues and spaces across Greater Manchester.
Building on the festival's record of working with communities, as audiences and as participants, Factory International will be a space where local people are actively involved – from participating in flagship commissions, co-designing programmes of activity, to shaping the organisation through involvement in its public forums. Through the Factory Academy, it will also become a major training centre for local people, equipping them with the skills needed for careers in the creative industries and helping to build the technicians, producers and other creative talent that will bring the future alive.
