Changing Times for Jobs Agencies: "Cruel" Market Puts Emphasis on Technology

The owner of an independent employment agency for nearly 22 years, Pat Woods has a perspective of the job market shaped by a perch on both sides of the hiring desk.

And this market, she says flatly, "is cruel."

Woods, forced by the technological revolution to re-invent a business inspired by her own experiences with the employment system, knows of what she speaks.

In a 1988 Post-Dispatch story, Woods recalled standing in line with 3,000 others hoping to fill eight openings at a Proctor & Gamble plant in the midst of the 1981 recession.

"I got there at 4 a.m.," Woods told former Post-Dispatch reporter Cynthia Todd. "I was somewhere near the number 2,000. It was the first time in my life when I found it impossible to find a job."

Woods didn't make the cut at Proctor & Gamble.

But she struck pay dirt later that year when the Chrysler plant in Fenton hired her for a three-month stint on the assembly line.

Then a single mother of two small children, Woods made the most of a tenure that stretched well beyond three months.

From her 4 p.m.-2 a.m. Chrysler shift, she headed each morning to her second job - a start-up janitorial service Woods bankrolled with her assembly line salary.

Eventually, the industrious Woods caught the eye of the managerial training staff at Monsanto.

Under its tutelage, Woods ultimately became the proprietor of the employment agency bearing her name, an enterprise dedicated to placing workers in entry-level to mid-level jobs.

For years, Woods and other employment agencies followed the same blueprint, acting as liaisons between job-seekers and human resources representatives for companies large and small.

The fee for the agency's services, in turn, was paid by either the applicant (usually a percentage of the first-year salary), the company or, by agreement, both parties.

Then came a seismic technological shift that altered the operating model for employment agencies as it has also forever reconfigured travel agencies, newspapers and countless other industries.

"The Internet has changed every business," said Elaine Romberg, the president of the National Independent Staffing Association. "It doesn't matter what business you're in."

For employment agencies, the Internet sent would-be clients away from fee-based agencies to online sites that offered job searches for free.

At Woods' shop, the ascent of the Internet coincided with a steep drop-off of local jobs in her specialty sectors, manufacturing, auto production and construction.

Now, a recession that has hit her African-American clientele base particularly hard is compounding the problem. African-Americans have a 15.4 percent nationwide jobless rate, compared with the overall national rate of 9.8 percent.

Not unlike job-seekers and the employed alike, Romberg points out that "a recruiter has to be willing to change with the times."

Woods has done exactly that.

Sure, she still lunches with hiring managers and HR types.

But, these days, technology increasingly directs her attention to tasks that were nonexistent just five or six years ago.

Such as ensuring a client's résumé contains the key words programmed into the digital scans HR departments use to identify qualified job candidates.

"These are middle-class people who made good money in what they were doing," said Woods. "And now they are being forced to make a major transition."

Her latest strategy, a trend receiving mixed reviews from the already overtaxed human resources community, are the video résumés that allow applicants to briefly make their case to human resources personnel via a DVD.

"This," she said, holding a disc aloft, "gives you seven minutes in front of a hiring manager, and a seven-minute window, sometimes, is all you need. It's better than a blind e-mail because HR will actually see the person."

So far, Woods has managed to dodge the forces that have shrunk membership in Romberg's group by 40 percent over a just a handful of years.

Not so long ago, though, Woods had no shortage of job-seekers gravitating to her Florissant office.

Today, unemployed, strapped for cash and unwilling to part with a percentage of a paycheck should they find employment, would-be applicants are fewer and farther between.

As a result, much of Woods' business comes from hiring managers that rely on her expertise to pre-screen applicants.

Still, she says that each day brings a reminder that the job of finding people jobs remains essentially the same.

It remains a simple matter of matching the right candidate with the right job - with the minor twist of making sure the key words match up.