Temp agencies find labor pool evaporating
By Michael Crowley, Globe Staff, 3/30/2000
[H.gif] ow tight is the labor market in Boston? Consider the latest
tactic of Franklin Pierce Temporaries, one of the city's biggest
temporary employment agencies.
For the past several weeks, six Franklin Pierce recruiters have been
methodically plowing through the Boston Area White Pages, cold-calling
everyone in the city with a listed phone number. Their question: Are
you or anyone you know looking for work?
''You've got to be creative nowadays, and try everything,'' said Dave
La Fauci, Franklin Pierce's vice president and general manager.
''Creativity is the key.''
With the state's unemployment rate hovering around 3 percent for the
past few months, employers throughout the city and across the state
have been strapped to fill new jobs created by the economic boom.
Temporary agencies say their once-reliable pools of people seeking
short-term work are drying up, and the response to traditional
newspaper and magazine advertisements has dropped significantly.
Increasingly, they say, they must resort to financial incentives and
innovative recruiting techniques to recruit the people they need.
''In the past, for any job you would advertise, you would get seven or
eight responses,'' said Stephen Flynn, owner of the COMFORCE temp
agency in Boston. ''Now if you get one or two, you feel very
fortunate. So you have to increase what you do to entice people.''
ComForce has begun putting fliers on parked cars, Flynn said, and is
devoting new energies to job fairs as well as the Internet.
But Flynn added that strong recruiting isn't enough. Referral bonuses
at ComForce that once peaked at $100 now run as high as $500. And the
company is offering benefits, paid vacations, and holidays to some of
its longer-term employees.
Wages for temps are up too, by as much as 15 to 20 percent over the
past few years, according to temp agency executives. La Fauci said
basic receptionist jobs that until recently paid between $9 and $10
per hour now pay $11 to $12 an hour. ''That's just phones,'' he said.
Flynn added that data-entry jobs that paid as little as $7 an hour in
the late 1990s now offer up to $10 per hour.
''There is definitely a shortage,'' said Jeanne Fiol, principal and
president of the temporary staffing division at KNF&T Staffing
Resources in Boston, which employs about 600 temp workers every week.
Fiol said staffing problems are especially acute in positions that
require employees with more than the most basic skills. ''There just
aren't enough qualified computer-literate candidates to go around,''
Fiol said.
KNF&T has yet to crack open the phone book, however. Fiol said she has
preferred to boost advertising budgets and spend more time surfing
job-seeker Web sites such as monster.com, a resume repository that has
become a temp-agency favorite. ''There's a great deal of Internet
recruiting going on,'' Fiol said.
In fact, Fiol was skeptical of some competitors' tactics. Relying on
the phone book, she said, is unlikely to yield the kind of skilled
employees that are most needed.
But La Fauci said he's happy with the results of the White Pages
experiment, dreamed up six months ago by Franklin Pierce employee
Kathleen Dorsey.
Every week, each of Franklin Pierce's six recruiters works through a
phone book page - each of which averages about 440 names, La Fauci
said.
The procedure has been averaging a mere two to three callbacks per
page, a response rate of less than 1 percent. But La Fauci said that
is enough to make it worthwhile.
''It's a numbers game,'' he said. ''You've got to go more in-depth on
your recruiting efforts, and leave no stone unturned.''
Plus, La Fauci added, he needs to do everything he can to stay a step
ahead of his rivals.
''There's high competition among my competitors,'' he said. ''Everyone
in the world has this problem right now.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 3/30/2000.
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