The temporary staffing industry has seen some wild ebbs and flows through the years, and Humanix Corp. President Nancy Nelson has ridden each of those waves. 

Nelson learned the industry from Humanix founder Julie Prafke, who started the company 30 years ago and became a high-profile member of Spokane’s business community. Like Prafke, Nelson has stayed on the forefront of trends in employment and workforce, while leading the company that offers temporary staffing, direct hires, and permanent placement. 

We sat down with Nelson recently to talk about the current job market, the workforce skills gaps, and other issues within the industry.

Journal: How has the work that Humanix does changed in the 30 years that the company has been in existence?

Nelson: Some components are the same, but a lot has changed. When I started in 1988, contingent staffing, or temporary staffing, was the larger focus. Companies utilized staffing for production peaks, for projects. It was more typical back in those years to use temporary staffing when someone was out on medical leave. 

What’s changed is people now use it as part of their strategic staffing. For example, the contract to hire, that’s an opportunity for both parties to try out the position, the fit. Not only the client, but the employee can say, “Is this a cultural fit for me?” That has grown over the 30 years. 

The other part is that more employers hire from a contingent pool. We see more and more companies adopting that as part of their strategic hiring process. They’ll bring on a pool of contingent employees, and from that pool, they’ll hire the top performers. I’ve seen that grow. 

The third component is the permanent division, the direct hire. That has grown more over the years, specifically for Humanix. The industry has always had the search/direct hire. In most staffing companies, they do both. About 80 percent in the industry do both contingent and direct hires. It’s a pretty common component, but I think it’s grown over the years. 

Journal: What is the percentage of business that’s temporary, and how much is permanent?

Nelson: For Humanix, the permanent division has been a smaller sector over those 30 years. We’ve put more emphasis in it in the last five years. We launched ours in 1998. That’s when we started working more in the direct hire. With the economy, you go up and you go down, and that focus changes. Since coming out of the recession, we’ve put more emphasis on that for diversification. 

Last year, we added a second direct-hire recruiter. We have two recruiters who focus on that. They do national searches and don’t cross back into the contingent, whereas we have a team of account managers that cross over in the contingent and the contract to hire. 

Journal: What kinds of positions are you looking at filling on the permanent side?

Nelson: We have one recruiter who really focuses on IT and engineering. Higher-level positions. The other one is more of a generalist. It can be accounting, sales, operations management. 

For us, the permanent division is growing, and that definitely is correlated with the tightening of the labor market and the skill gaps. It takes more search and sourcing to find that right fit. What our recruiters do is go out and find that passive candidate who might be the match and say, “Are you ready for the next career step?” And then, convince that person that this is your career step.

The passive candidates, they’re not out there looking at job boards. They just going on in their job and suddenly think, “Oh, that’s an interesting opportunity” when it’s presented to them. 

That’s where hiring has changed over the years. You don’t just post a job on your website or in the paper and hope people come. 

That’s where we had 100 percent growth last year. Since we added another recruiter, we should have that. (laughs) We’re managing about a 25 percent growth this year. We see that strengthening for five to 10 years. 

Journal: On the temporary side, what are the trends in volume for that?

Nelson: It definitely goes with the economy. Obviously, during the Great Recession, we were hit very hard. As most companies tightened their belt, we were the first sector to be cut back. It definitely was a slow recovery. It took many years. 

Now, the skills gap is what’s keeping most people up today. We really hope it becomes much more of a national conversation and that something can be done over the years to alleviate that. We see it every day.

But back to your question, for the last three years, we’ve had growth. The industry as a whole is growing faster than the GDP growth. This year is a little flat, but that parallels with the economy.

The manufacturing sector is our largest industry. One of the challenges for us is that some of the larger manufacturing companies have moved out of the area. For example, General Dynamics closed their plant completely. We had the challenge to replace that business with other business, which we’ve been able to do. But it makes us more flat.

Another example is Ecova. They grew so large nationally that they had to make the decision to go with a national staffing firm. We’re more Inland Northwest focused. Again, we were challenged to replace that business, which we were able to do, but that’s with a lot of hard work.

Journal: You mentioned that you’re more regional. What is your geographic scope?

Nelson: We like to work directly with our clients. We like to have that personal relationship. It’s really the Inland Northwest. We have an office in Coeur d’Alene and here in Spokane. We certainly can do searches nationwide, but for contingent, we really believe it’s the Northwest. We’ve reached out to Moses Lake in the past, but that’s pretty rare. It’s Cheney to Coeur d’Alene, up to Hayden. We’ve done work up in Sandpoint, but not in recent years. 

We do have an office in Las Vegas, but that is to serve one client. It’s a unique story. It’s a digital-print company that’s in Hayden. They were bought by a company in Las Vegas and opened a plant there, and they asked us to follow them. They’re large enough that we were able to do that. 

That’s quite a compliment, to have a client say, “We don’t want to work with anyone else. Will you follow us?” 

Journal: How’s the workforce inventory right now?

Nelson: It’s a very tight labor market. And as I mentioned earlier, the skills gap is a concern for all employers. We definitely see it every day in our matching of candidates to job orders.

I anticipate that the tight labor market isn’t going away. It’s here for a number of years. It’s definitely a transition as baby boomers retire. We’re seeing that more, and we feel it. We have more jobs than we have people we can fill them with. 

But we’re also very careful to really protect our client base and not take on new business that will take away from our clients who have been with us for years. We’ve had to turn down a number of job orders, because we knew we’d be looking at that same candidate base as we had for our current clients. That’s hard as a business, but it’s the right thing to do. We had to say, “That’s our strategy. We’re going to take care of our core.”

Journal: There might be a skills gap, but I’ve heard that with the legalization of marijuana, it’s also harder to find someone who can pass a drug test in certain industries. Has that been your experience? 

Nelson: Yes. I would say we definitely have more positives for marijuana, and we are a drug-free workplace. That’s where we’re taking an effort to educate the job seeker. It’s been legalized, but companies still have a zero tolerance. But the job seeker doesn’t make that connection yet. They come in and realize they can’t pass a drug test, and we say, “Sorry. We can’t hire you.” 

We recently had a high-level position, probably $75,000-plus, and the person failed. 

But it’s usually the younger job seeker who doesn’t know yet. 

Journal: Back to the skills gap, what do you see as some of the solutions?

Nelson: Definitely more vocational school, very specific training to current and anticipated jobs in the future. I sit on the Spokane Area Workforce Development Council board, and I’m part of the youth career and education network, so that’s a huge focus for me. I’ve been on the workforce council since 2001 and the youth council for five or six years now. 

Education is a huge part, but that’s an issue nationwide.  But locally, it’s vocational training. 

Another thing that will help is more internships. During the Great Recession, many of our youth never had opportunity for that first job, whether it was retail or fast food or some other restaurant. They didn’t have it. That was replaced with a person who had been downsized. 

That has improved, but the unemployment rate for youth is still high. We’re really trying to work with companies to offer mentorships and internships. Plant those seeds of career opportunities. With youth, they don’t know the opportunities that are out there. They have their family focus, so unless that’s broad and being mentored by a family member, they don’t know. 

I’d like to see more of that focus and more of the business community supporting that. 

Journal: Talking about Humanix internally, give me an idea of your size.

Nelson: We have 18 staff. 

Journal: Has that remained pretty consistent through the years? 

Nelson: No, it’s really fluctuated through the years. At one point, we had 50 staff with three offices, two in Spokane and one in Coeur d’Alene. During that peak time, we had two licensed vocational schools. 

This is going back a ways, but what we found in 1989 and 1990 is that our workforce didn’t have the computer skills. Their skills were lagging the technology growth. We were putting people into office positions that didn’t have the computer skills. 

We looked at solutions locally, and most of the education offerings at that time were full programs. We ran that from 1996 to 2004, but by 2004, we felt there were enough training opportunities in the community. That wasn’t our mission. 

Journal: You’re the company’s second CEO. Can you take us through how you came to the company and how your career grew within it?

Nelson: I graduated from GU. I have two degrees, one in organizational development and one in marketing. I did an internship in HR at the Bon Marche, which is now Macy’s. I really decided then to go more of the human resources track. I did that and got hired at the Bon Marche. I did a curve and ended up managing their picture framing department. It was an awesome opportunity to learn from a management standpoint. I had a staff of five people, and right out of college, that was fantastic. 

I did that for three years, then I stayed home with my first daughter. And then I came to Humanix. They hired me as a recruiter. Probably about my second year at Humanix, I realized I loved the industry. When I started, I thought I would learn the recruiting part, then step into full HR management. But after that second year, I thought, “I love what I do. I don’t want to leave.” Julie (Prafke, Humanix’s founder and first CEO) was a wonderful mentor. 

We had set up the company as an ESOP about a year into my employment, and then I really saw the opportunity. Within three or four years, I made the decision that Humanix would be my career. I haven’t been really tempted to step outside of that.