Hire Purpose

Necessity is the mother of invention.

That’s how Mary Ellen Scott described her beginnings in the temporary-employment industry. “It’s been the story of my life, really,” she told BusinessWest before explaining at length just what that means.

Scott is the owner of United Personnel in Springfield, which is celebrating 25 years in business. With the industry changing dramatically in that quarter-century, that adage has been in use for much of the time, seeing Scott and company becoming one of the area’s leading placement firms. Looking back on her time in business, she explained how it has come together over the years.

When Scott and her family moved to Springfield in the early 1980s, a chance encounter with a friend of her then-husband, John Canavan Jr., led to a new career.

“It was a clothing manufacturer, the old William Carter Co.,” she said, “and it was the only unionized plant in the William Carter conglomerate. They wanted to get rid of it, so they sold it to a man who went to prep school with my husband.” That was Joel Gordon, who bought the factory and renamed it the Gemini Corp., and who contacted Scott at home one day.

“Here I was unpacking boxes,” she said, “and this man called me up and said, ‘do you want a job?’ Well, I had been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years, so I said, ‘doing what?’ and he said ‘well, what can you do?’”

Despite her modest assessment of that interaction, Scott became the human resources director for the plant of 400 employees. But the two-income household was soon to be cut back to one. In 1984, her husband lost his job. “He was 51 years old,” she said. “That was and is definitely an issue in the job-hunting market.”

After looking for work for more than eight months, Gordon suggested to him to strike out on his own. With a brother in the temporary-help business in Boston, Canavan decided to give that field a shot. Scott explained why.

“From an entrepreneur’s perspective, in concept, it’s not a very complicated business to get into,” she said. Smiling, she added, “but it is hard to do it well. In the grand scheme, though, you don’t need to know how to operate a lot of machines, and it doesn’t take a great deal of capital up front.”

Starting the company in Hartford, Canavan drew upon the vast needs of that city’s many insurance firms to specialize in clerical temps. Scott laughed when she remembered her husband’s attempts for her to work with him.

“It was critical to hire the right person for him to work with,” she said, “but would anyone be willing to jump at a job at a start-up operation, getting paid very little money, when they would have to work very hard, and quit a job that they enjoyed? That’s the question I was asking myself.”

For two months, Canavan sought someone to oversee front-of-the-house operations —interviews, hiring, placements — while he handled marketing, sales, and the administrative details. As before, fate intervened in Scott’s decisions.

“My job at this time was changing,” she explained. “Our friend had brought in this new manager, a graduate of MIT and West Point. He had a very different idea about how to treat people than I had.

“One particularly bad Friday afternoon,” she continued, “I had to be in on a session with him and one of the employees, and I came home and I said to my husband, ‘I think God is trying to tell me something. If we’re going to do this staffing business, we’re going to do it together.’”

After three months of commuting in separate cars to Hartford — “in case one of us needed to go back to the kids,” Scott said — the first order came in. But it didn’t take long for the pair to hit their stride, and within two years, they opened a branch office in Springfield, at the location still in use today, 1331 Main St.

Along the way, the business shifted gears from a focus on clerical temps to a division that served the light-industrial sector. “That was a fortuitous decision,” Scott said. “The economy was changing at the end of the ’80s into the early ’90s. Insurance companies in Hartford were struggling with their real-estate deals gone bad. And the first thing a company does when times are hard is to cut back on new temps. So our business in Hartford went downhill.”

But the Springfield office prospered, becoming one of Inc. magazine’s top 500 fastest-growing companies in 1993 and 1995. “The diverse client list we had here really pulled us through,” Scott said. Not only did they handle clerical and industrial clients, but MassMutual and BayBank were early customers as well. When Canavan passed away in 1999, Scott became the sole owner of the business.

Does Not Compute

“During the early years,” Scott said, “we had no computers at all. We had two electric typewriters, and everything was done on paper.”

Personal computers, however, changed that — and changed the nature of her business. “Companies changed how many secretaries they used,” she said, “and some people don’t use secretaries at all anymore.

“The clerical sector, which at one point was 100% of our business, became a much lower percentage,” she continued. “These days, we are primarily a light-industrial staffing company, about 70% in manufacturing.”

Pointing to a stack of boxes waiting to be moved out of the office’s hallways, Scott said that the old-fashioned pen to paper is still necessary for many forms — I9s and W4s, and applications still filled out by hand — but digital communication has become the new tool of choice for United and nearly every other business in this sector. “While e-mailing certainly makes us more available for our clients,” she said, adding that someone in her office is on call around the clock every day, she motioned with a smile at that pile of boxes and said, “I don’t think computers have made less paperwork.”

Still, Scott said her job is still done, in many ways, just like in the first days of the business. Describing the challenges of staffing in different sectors, she said that clerical candidates still need to be interviewed; “It’s a little more of a conversation to get those jobs filled.”

Manufacturing often involves her clients requesting multiple orders. “We get calls for upwards of 40 orders,” she said of the number of employee needs. “It can be challenging to find that many people right for the job.”

While pundits search for hope in the murky economic forecast, Scott said that business at United, and the sector as a whole, is definitely picking up, which is a good sign.

“When the economy is on the way down, we’re the first to know it, and on the way back up we’re the first to know it also,” she explained.

“Manufacturing clients are getting orders, and they need workers,” she continued. “We have all different kinds of businesses, and they all seem to be picking up, calling for temps.”

Hiring Line

Looking at the next milestone of her successful career, Scott said that the she is thinking about branching out into health-care staffing, acknowledging that it is one of the region’s growth industries.

“Personally,” she laughed, “I don’t know anything about the licensing and laws involved in that sector. So I will have to hire some expertise in that field.”

In other words, she’ll take the approach she has from the beginning: that necessity may be the mother of invention, but hard work and imagination are the secrets to success.

And neither Scott nor her company have ever been lacking in those qualities.