Boston Globe Online

Stephen E Philion philion at hawaii.edu
Thu Mar 30 14:03:58 PST 2000


Boston Globe ]

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.

© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.

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