Dear Time-Reader

This week I would like to tell you about a vivacious lady named Margaret McConnell, and her job here at TIME which carries the title Personnel Manager for Women.

Margaret began her personnel career in a rather ironic way, by playing the part of a slave girl in Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments. She was going to Hollywood High School at the time. Says she: "Everybody was a part of the movie colony in those days. I heard that the studio was paying $5 a day for extras, so I applied." She soon learned that student extras were in great demand at other studios and particularly for the rash of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach two-reel comedies that were being turned out. Result: Margaret set up her own personnel bureau and began recruiting fellow students for the sand-lot epics and near-epics.

In her present job of recruiting girls for TIME, Margaret and two assistants go through some 5,000 interviews a year. These interviews are primarily a screening process. If the candidate seems promising, she is sent to the department head who has a staff opening, and he does the actual hiring. The usual positions to be filled are office girls, clerks, typists, secretaries, copywriters and researchers.

There are three regular on-the-job training programs for office girls, business trainees and editorial research trainees. Candidates for the office-girl program must be high school graduates. They work for the various departments at TIME, and at the end of the first three months, a girl is eligible to take any job for which she is qualified. The usual first step up is to clerk-typist.

The business trainees, recruited from colleges, must be able to type, take shorthand, or should have a background in mathematics or statistical work. They train for approximately six months. During this time they have temporary assignments (in such departments as circulation, promotion, advertising sales, production, accounting or office management) before getting a specific job.

The editorial research trainees must also be college graduates. Candidates are chosen on their scholarship record, an aptitude for and interest in journalism, and past experience in either summer work or extracurricular activities. They must also be able to type. Each spring, Margaret and her assistants go on talent-scouting trips to nearby women's colleges to interview interested applicants. The new trainees work the first three weeks as office girls, followed by a few weeks in such departments as the morgue, letters and the clip desk (clipping New York and out-of-town newspapers). The trainee then attends a four-week course, directed by an experienced TIME researcher, studying the rudiments of editorial research for TIME before she is assigned to a department.

The annual recruiting trips to colleges, says Margaret, bring back old memories. As a student in the University of California at Los Angeles, she got a part-time job as clerk in the registrar's office, later became assistant to the registrar specializing in students' problems. Along about this time, she says, most of the students were more interested in radio than the movies, and she was no exception. "I had a ukulele and I sang, so I got on the radio--three performances a week for $10."

After eight years of part-time singing and student personnel work, she succumbed to the long-distance lure of New York and headed east to solve a personnel problem of her own: how not to become a secretary, a job that did not appeal to her, although she knew shorthand and typing. Luck seemed with her. She was hired for a research job with a Manhattan advertising agency--and impressed everyone as so efficient that one of the vice presidents drafted her to be a secretary. Margaret fled. She soon landed a job at FORTUNE magazine, but, she recalls, "my shorthand soon caught up with me and I was a secretary again."

However, this time Margaret stayed on, eventually became office manager in the editorial department. In 1946 she took over as head of TIME'S letters department for five years before coming to her present assignment in personnel, where some of you may well be meeting her in person one of these days.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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