Adapting to the Job - Employment Agency Changes With the Times
By: Grant Huang, Staff Writer
Maryland Gazette

Finding the right job for the right employee has been Rocco Sovero Jr.’s job for more than 40 years.

“I like to think of it as an opportunity to do a good deed every day,” said Mr. Sovero, owner of Nancy Adams Personnel and Ford Employment in Glen Burnie. “We touch the lives more people than you can imagine.”

The company interviews potential job applicants to see if they’re suitable for a position among the large list of employers looking for qualified workers. It can take days or months, but Mr. Sovero estimated that roughly 60 percent of applicants end up with a job — and not a temporary one, either.

About 90 percent of the jobs, which range from clerical work to sales and engineering, are full-time, permanent positions. For its role as the matchmaking middleman, Nancy Adams gets a finder’s fee from the business once they hire the applicant  — who pays nothing.

“The best part about this job is that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you place someone,” said Mr. Sovero, 62. “I’ll probably never be a millionaire. But I love my job and I doubt I’ll ever retire.”
Monday’s holiday will mark the 31st year of business for the staffing agency, originally located in downtown Baltimore. In 1978, that main office split into four separate, individually owned companies that all chose to retain the name “Nancy Adams Personnel.”

One moved to Towson and another to Columbia, while Mr. Sovero set up shop in the Empire Towers off Ritchie Highway. He took over the remains of the Baltimore office two years later.
Since the split, Mr. Sovero estimated that the four offices had managed to place around 600,000 applicants. He consolidated the Baltimore office into the Glen Burnie office in 1989 and estimates that his staff has placed about 40,000 job seekers.

“That’s a lot of families whose lives we’ve touched,” he said.

One example is Carla Laughery of Crofton, who was working part-time at Safeway and full-time job as an accounting associate at the University of Maryland.

After spending seven years at the accounting job, she quit in September, confident that her college degree and experience would be enough to land her in greener pastures.
But finding a better job was harder than expected; she had to ask her boss at Safeway to give her full-time hours and the 39-year-old began to worry that she was simply too old. After all, she only got her degree in business management in 2004.

“I definitely wasn’t fresh out of college,” Ms. Laughery said. “I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do.”

So she visited Nancy Adams and soon landed a position at an electrical contracting company as an accounts payable manager.

“I like figures and I like details, so I’m in the spot I should be,” she said. “It was awesome coming to (Nancy Adams), you don’t pay anything out of pocket and they do the legwork for you.”

At the same time, employers have a hard time finding good help these days, Mr. Sovero said.
“People’s work ethics aren’t so good anymore,” he said. “They want a company car. They want to start at $12 an hour. They don’t want to work through their lunch hour.”

It’s also a matter of effort, particularly for the small and medium-sized companies that make up the bulk of Nancy Adams’ clientele.

“We want someone else to do all the screening and just send over someone who’s going to work,” said Ronni Mayer, director of human resources for United Iron and Metal in Baltimore.
Her company hired five employees referred by Nancy Adams and have kept three in permanent positions.

“Most of the owners of scrap yards just don’t have time or the personnel for this kind of screening,” she said. “They’re small-business owners who would rather get a consultant to figure out what has to be done.”

Of course, getting things done becomes much harder when the economy stalls — which is one of the hardest parts of the business, Mr. Sovero said.

“If things are tight and unemployment is high, it gets a lot harder to find jobs,” he said. “If the economy’s great and everyone’s got a job, we have to find more business.”
But Mr. Sovero’s aunt, 82-year-old Gloria Luke Walker Brown, said the company has always been able to adapt.

“I think it’s seen every kind of economy there is,” said Mrs. Brown, who helped start the original Nancy Adams Personnel office in 1957.  “It’s weathered the storms. And you might give a lot but you get a lot back, too. People appreciate what we’ve done for them and they don’t forget it.”