Sitel in Starkville to add 100-150 jobs
December 5, 2012
By STEVEN NALLEY
educ@starkvilledailynews.com
Sitel Corp. announced plans Tuesday to hire 3,000 more workers in the U.S. and Canada, and a Sitel representative has confirmed 100-150 of those jobs will be coming to Sitel’s Starkville offices.
As a global outsourcing call center company, Sitel provides customer care, customer acquisition, transaction processing and other business processing services for other companies. Andrew Kokes, Sitel vice president for global product management and marketing, said Sitel has garnered more of these clients and expanded its dealings with some of its existing clients, making the new hires possible.
“Some portion of the available positions address a need for (increased personnel) during the holidays,” Kokes said. “Sitel in Starkville has hired roughly 245 new employees since the end of October 2012, and we currently expect to hire an additional 100 to 150 over the next 30 days.”
Sitel also offers “Work@Home” positions, which Kokes said allow prospective employees to join Sitel from anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. He said several hundred of the new positions are “Work@Home” positions, also intended to support both holiday and permanent roles.
Kokes said because some of the hires are tied to businesses’ holiday needs, those hires will be temporary, but the majority of the new hires will not be temporary.
“I don’t have the exact number,” Kokes said, “but some of them are being hired with that expectation that it will be for a limited amount of time.”
In early August, Kokes said 58 of Sitel’s employees would be laid off in September, not because of any employee performance issues, but because of Sitel clients’ changing needs. On Tuesday, Kokes said these layoffs were averted.
“While one program did come to an end, and an associated notice was made, other business needs with existing clients provided work opportunities and benefited all those employees that were part of the group associated with the announcement,” Kokes said. “All displaced employees in September were offered like positions with other client programs managed by Sitel.”
Kokes said Sitel in Starkville currently has 570 employees, already an increase from the 500 employees he said were working at Sitel in August.
“The Starkville site is a top performer in the Sitel network of more than 120 global locations,” Kokes said. “Sitel Starkville provides customer service for multiple clients.”
Kokes said the increase in workforce does not mean Sitel will expand its Starkville office building, located in the Thad Cochran Research Park.
“Sitel’s current capacity is sufficient to meet our needs,” Kokes said.
