Finding Jobs Coast-to-Coast

About 800,000 Americans change their jobs every month--and half of them move to other towns or states in the process. The increased mobility of the labor force is drastically altering the 4,300 U.S. employment agencies, which until recently have usually limited their operations to a single city or region. Today's trend is to chain agencies, which process job openings and applicants nationally. The pioneer of the chains, and the biggest of them, is Philadelphia-based Snelling and Snelling, whose 119 offices in 29 states last year found jobs for 100,000 Americans and brought in $6,500,000 for the company.

Willing & Anxious. Until 1956, Snelling and Snelling was only Philadelphia's largest employment agency. But its late founder, Louis Snelling Jr., noticed that more and more applicants were willing and even anxious to move elsewhere. To accommodate them, he organized franchised agencies in other cities--a system taken over and expanded by his sons, Robert, 31, now president, and Louis, 33, secretary-treasurer. Because of their youth, the brothers sometimes feel it necessary to deepen their voices and throw in such phrases as "In all my years of experience . . ."

The prices of Snelling franchises range from $27,600 for a third of the Chicago area to $3,000 for Yuma, Ariz. In return, franchisers get a two-week training course at Philadelphia headquarters, together with manuals that explain such things as how to furnish a waiting room ("Do not buy small magazines, such as the Reader's Digest or National Geographic, since they quickly disappear"); how to arrange a desk drawer; and how to size up an applicant's "steak" (education, marital status, job history) and "sizzle" (personality, awards, hobbies) in a ten-minute interview. Franchisers clear up to 20% of their fees as profit.

Manufacturers & Biologists. Snelling and Snelling clients pay set fees: for an annual salary of $4,100 the charge is $255, for $10,400 it jumps to $965. Jobs nowadays are easier to find in the Northwest, Southeast and Rocky Mountain states, are more plentiful in such service-oriented industries as insurance, real estate and banking. Engineers, once the prima ballerinas of industry, are less in demand; calls for engineers two months ago dropped to their lowest point in more than three years. Many technicians, moreover, are leery about the uncertainties of defense work and sometimes will take pay cuts in return for steadier employment. "A starch manufacturer," says Bob Snelling, "wouldn't have half the trouble getting a microbiologist or a chemist that a defense contractor would."

Snelling and Snelling has placed men in jobs as far away as Bangkok (for a transportation study), now has offers for jobs in labor-short West Germany. It sometimes places foreigners in U.S. jobs, found an electrical engineer's berth for a Sikh after he was turned down by 15 companies because of his beard and turban. Such applications have led the brothers to plan overseas offices. They recognize that the new American mobility is beginning to flow over national borders almost as easily as it does across state lines.

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