By Beth Fitzgerald
Originally Published in NJBIZ - February 21, 2011
J. Knipper is a health care marketing company in Lakewood that provides a wide variety of solutions to pharmaceutical companies, from regulatory compliance and sales force productivity, to packing and shipping product literature and samples to customers. And Dawn Walsh, manager of human resources, said she often relies on temporary workers to meet the fluctuating labor needs of the business.
When last-minute work comes in, says Dawn Walsh, manager of human resources at J. Knipper, the company turns to temporary hires in order to complete assignments.
“Sometimes a job comes in at the last minute,” she said, in which case she’ll call her staffing company in the morning and have temporary workers on hand for the afternoon shift. “We need to be very flexible. We have to have people here exactly when we need them.”
Koleen Singerline, senior vice president at the staffing company Snelling, in Eatontown, said temporary employment represents a bright spot in a labor market that’s making a slow upward climb.
Employers who aren’t ready to hire a permanent employee are doing “temp-to-hire” instead, she said. The employee’s assignment might last several weeks or months, and when the time comes to make a permanent hire, “the employer now has a whole pool of people” to consider, Singerline said. “It’s like a working interview.”
Ron Safier, managing partner of The Career Finders staffing firm, said temp-to-hire has been the key to the success of his company — and industry — during the past three years of rough economic weather.
In an encouraging sign for the economy, at the end of 2010, Safier said he began to see an uptick in companies filling vacant jobs with direct hires, as opposed to temporary workers, “a nice indicator that companies are starting to hire again.”
The Career Finders has offices in Parsippany, Mount Laurel and the King of Prussia section of Upper Merion, Pa.; it specializes in placing accounting, administrative and human resources professionals. And Safier said he’s seeing increased demand for those professionals by manufacturers, real estate developers, retailers and nonprofits.
“The key one is manufacturing — the manufacturing sector is a big indicator of what the economy is doing,” he said. “We have several clients that are giving us direct-hire orders for senior-level HR and senior-level finance and accounting positions.”
Safier said 2008 and 2009 each were tough years, but his company had 50 percent revenue growth in 2010, and is optimistic for a repeat this year.
Right now, Frank Pinto, co-owner of Challenge Training & Consulting, in Clifton, is seeing “the very beginning of the New Jersey job market picking up — but clients are cautious and fiscally conservative. They want to make sure they have the right people, versus going out and recruiting 20 people. If only eight work out in a year, it’s a very big expense to onboard and terminate them.”
Another key part of Pinto’s business is long-term, temporary placements, which can last for several years. “We provide people on long-term staffing assignments: They work for the client and are managed by the client, but we are the back office, we handle the medical benefits. And they can be on assignment for four or five years.”
Pinto said companies are practicing “a new kind of fiscal responsibility, because of what they have gone through” during the economic downturn. But as employers rebuild their staffs, he is seeing demand for IT, health care and finance professionals.
“Financial services downsized to the point that they went through the fat and into the muscle of the organization. They may have one person doing two to three jobs.” The stock market has been recovering, finance industry profits are up “and they have realized that people can only hold on and work these crazy hours for so long,” he said.