Interviewing More Than A Thousand At Sea-Tac

It's nothing like the thousands who've been laid off over the past three years, but it's a start. Boeing is hiring again.

The company was to set up shop Thursday at Sea-Tac Airport to interview about 1,000 candidates. By the end of the year, the Seattle Times reports Boeing could hire about 3,000 new workers. In addition to hiring in the US, Boeing is reportedly looking for 500 or so contract engineers and plans to increase staffing at its Moscow Design Bureau to a total of 1,000 workers.

Boeing first went through its list of laid off workers, trying to find those whose skills matched the company's new list of needs. Now, the aerospace giant says it's exhausted that list and is issuing a blanket "help wanted" message.

"We hit that road first," said Donna Wildrick, senior manager of Boeing Global Staffing, in an interview with the Times. "We've pulled in all of the recalls that were meeting the needs of these openings."

The number of people matching Boeing's needs is smaller than you might think. They must be highly-skilled engineers with the ability to obtain security clearances to work on defense projects. Many of those workers will end up building the new Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft (a 737 derivative, below).

The company is also sifting through another rather small labor pool of structural stress specialists as it continues design work on the 7E7.

Perhaps ironically, Boeing is looking for many of its structural engineers in Europe. There, design work on the Airbus A380 is complete and there's a known cadre of specialists who just might be on the make for a job at the European consortium's number-one competitor.

That's a big reason that we're having the recruiting effort going on over in Europe," said Boeing Global Staff Director Rich Hartnett. "Part of our aggressive (overseas recruiting) effort now is to get our applications in for that limited amount of work visas," said Hartnett. That's got to be in time for Boeing to submit the visa paperwork to the government. In October, the US will issue 65,000 H1-B work visas.

FMI: www.boeing.com