At the end of the day Saturday, 3,476 people applied for jobs at Boeing’s plant in North Charleston Saturday in what was a turbulent day of furious filing, shifting deadlines and, for some in the middle of it, frayed nerves.
During the first couple of hours the assembler/fabricator position was posted, demand was so great that the state job website was overwhelmed. The application deadline was extended, according to the ReadySC spokeswoman for the Boeing project, Lauren Hanson.
The cutoff time changed throughout the day Saturday as applications flooded in. At one point it was as late as today, then Hanson announced it would be “sometime [Saturday] evening,” before finally settling on an “official” deadline of midnight Saturday.
Asked to describe the 24 hours, Hanson, who helped manage the process with a colleague in Columbia, said “busy.” She added “exciting” and “eventful,” then circled back to her first thought.
“It’s been a busy day,” a weary Hanson concluded. “It’s really been a busy day.”
Less than two hours after the Boeing job listing went live just after midnight Friday, the ReadySC website already featured a heading that revised the previous plan, which was to accept 3,000 applications for spots in a potential employee pool and then shut down the listing.
“The Boeing recruitment will be available on the site until at least Sunday, August 14th,” the statement on the site read. “If you are having trouble submitting your application, please try again later.”
The idea was to defuse the panic and to encourage patience. But as the number of applications continued to soar skyward around midday, it was clear another correction was in order. The heading changed twice more throughout the day to reflect the Saturday, then midnight, deadlines.
Despite the slow-loading website www.jobaps.com/sccat, roughly 1,500 people had submitted applications by 8 a.m., Hanson said. The morning number had doubled before 7 p.m. and stood at more than 3,200 just after 9 p.m., she said.
A Boeing spokeswoman said the volume of applications received was expected and encouraging.
“It tells us people are interested and excited about having Boeing in the area,” Candy Eslinger, the Charleston spokeswoman for the Chicago-based aviation giant, said.
Eslinger has said this weekend’s solicitation, run by the state workforce training program as part of Boeing’s incentive package, is meant to attract 1,000 qualified workers, a pool from which Boeing can hire going forward.
Last week, she emphasized that the hiring process is not immediate but encouraged people to apply when the listing went live Saturday at 12:01 a.m., promising an “easy” application process. The actual application steps may have been, but navigating from page to page on the website was not.
Samantha Steele, assistant manager at the Mattress Firm on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, would know. Her live-in boyfriend, David Caldwell, set his alarm for just before midnight to make sure he woke up to apply.
“It woke me up,” Steele recalled spiritedly Saturday afternoon. “And then he comes back after 30 minutes of trying.”
He hadn’t been able to get through. Both had trouble getting back to sleep.
“It was really a waste of time,” Steele said, referring to the latest episode in a series of attempts Caldwell has made.
She called the process “quite the rigmarole” and then echoed a co-worker’s comments about the perceived lottery of Boeing employment.
“Everyone he talks to says it’s easier to get accepted to Harvard than to get a job at Boeing,” Steele said.
The speed of the site seemed to improve by mid-morning, likely a result of a more steady pace of applications, said Hanson, who said she helped prospective applicants with account and technical issues throughout the day.
This is the third application drive that Boeing has conducted through ReadySC.
At the end of 2009, about 10,000 people applied, and once that pool was exhausted, Boeing, through ReadySC, solicited another 1,000 applications in June, Hanson said earlier this week.
Applicants for the entry-level positions must be available to work anytime, be able to stand for long periods and work on elevated spaces. They also must be high school graduates, or equivalent, and have at least one year of relevant work experience.
If they qualify, prospective employees must be interviewed and undergo screenings, then complete a multi-step training program, the first part of which is unpaid, before they are eligible for full-time employment at Boeing. Eslinger would not say what the positions pay, only that the company’s compensation package is “above average” for the region.
Boeing has about 5,000 employees and contractors at its Charleston International Airport site, according to Eslinger. That figure includes workers at two factories that supply the 787 aft- and mid-body fuselage sections.
The new third plant, where Boeing is assembling its first locally produced Dreamliner, is expected to have a payroll of 3,800.
That it was accepted far more applications than there are jobs did not seem to concern the company or government representatives. They referred to the high applicant to qualified candidate ratio — as much as 10:1 — and emphasized the process, not only for the jobseekers but also for the company.
“This is a new, basically a from-the-ground-up operation,” Eslinger said. “We want to do it the right way. We don’t want to hire a bunch of people we may decide that we don’t need.
“That’s why it’s taking us a while to ramp up — to make sure we’re ramping up our production and our people deliberately and consistently,” said Eslinger, who earlier this week said Boeing has been hiring about 20 people a month.
Hanson made a simpler promise: “We’re not going to train people that they don’t need,” she said.
The first South Carolina-made 787 is scheduled for delivery next year, and by the end of 2013, three planes a month will be assembled in North Charleston.
Source: http://www.postandcourier.com
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