Mail-Order Expansion Coldwater Creek Looking To Fill Hundreds Of Jobs From East Coast To Sandpoint

After exceeding its employment expectations for the holiday catalog sales season by about 100 workers, Coldwater Creek is back in the hiring mode to fill jobs at a new East Coast call center and distribution facility in Parkersburg, W.Va.

At the same time, North Idaho’s largest employer is holding a job fair Friday in Spokane to attract hard-to-find computer experts, said Karen Clark, employment and recruitment manager for the Sandpoint mail-order firm.

Clark said hiring a few key “information systems specialists” can be as challenging as finding enough people to fill a much larger number of jobs in Coldwater Creek’s distribution center east of Sandpoint, as well as two call centers in Sandpoint and Coeur d’Alene.

“I’ve heard there are 95,000 jobs open in the I.S. field across the nation,” she said, adding that competition for those employees is coming from major high-tech companies. “But we have an edge on someplace like Microsoft - look at the commute their employees have to make.”

Increasingly, though, the catalog company is attracting commuters who make the trip from Eastern Washington and North Idaho.

The call center in Sandpoint hired employees from as far away as Clark Fork, Idaho, and Newport, Wash., in December, while its sister facility in Coeur d’Alene lured workers from the Spokane Valley, Clark said.

Coldwater Creek’s original estimate of 1,700 employees for the Christmas season was about 6 percent lower than the final head count.

“The total was almost 1,800,” Clark said. “And we had an army on call waiting for peak days. We finally had to turn off the faucet because we were getting so much interest.”

Coldwater Creek received most of its holiday leads for call-center jobs from a hiring kiosk at the Silver Lake Mall. A similar kiosk at the Spokane Valley Mall attracted fewer prospects, Clark said.

The “front line” employees working at the call centers are required to be comfortable with the Windows operating system and type 35 to 40 words per minute. Wages start at $6.50 per hour and top out at $9.75.

The company found higher skill levels in Coeur d’Alene than in cities surrounding its Bonner County headquarters, Clark said.

“We’re looking at a limited population up here,” she explained. “But it might also be a reflection on the schools.

“To put that in perspective,” Clark continued, “we interviewed 2,800 people here and hired about 900.”

Major employers like Coldwater Creek recently joined forces with other members of the business and professional community to improve Bonner County schools to advance economic development and guarantee a future supply of qualified employees.

In West Virginia, where the mail-order firm will open a $30 million distribution center and call center complex in early 1999, a larger pool of applicants promises a shorter hiring process for the approximately 600 positions to be filled in Parkersburg.

With no advertising, the company has 2,000 applications on file.

Coldwater Creek will hire 200 people to staff an interim distribution center scheduled to open in May. Once those jobs are filled, an interim call center will be staffed. When the permanent East Coast facility is completed next year, the distribution center will employ 400, with 200 people working in the call center.

“It will be a combination of some folks from this area relocating with the company and a lot of local hires,” said Barbara Staresinic, employment and recruiting manager.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: Cut in the Spokane edition.

Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. JOB FAIR Coldwater Creek’s job fair is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday at the new Hotel Lusso, Sprague and Post, in Spokane.

2. NEW EXECUTIVE NAMED Coldwater Creek announced Wednesday that Thomas H. Scott has joined the company as vice president and chief information officer. Before joining the Sandpoint-based catalog company, Scott served as president of Gestalt Technologies Inc., a high-technology firm that creates business systems for large companies. Before that, he worked as vice president of business systems for VF Corp., a $5 billion global apparel manufacturer.