Listening Company hears call for jobs

Oct 3 2008 by Karen Dent, The Journal

A CALL centre group has pledged to create 500 jobs at its new offices in Newcastle this year and to double that number within six months.

The Listening Company plans to open a contact centre in St James Gate at the start of next month and is now recruiting customer service, sales advisers, management, training and recruitment staff.

The £55m revenue business, with a nationwide workforce of more than 2,500 people, recently acquired the essentiagroup which already runs a call centre in Newcastle’s All Saints Business Centre. Essentia works with public sector clients including the Department of Health, but the new Listening Company centre will concentrate on the private sector. Its first customer is BSkyB and it is in talks with a mobile provider.

Listening Company spokesman Philip Shuldham-Legh said Newcastle ticked a number of boxes for the expanding company, which has seen its business grow by 40% year-on-year for the last three years.

“It’s a fantastic place for contact centres. We have quite a presence in the South and we already have offices in Newcastle through one of our subsidiaries. Newcastle, for our client base, is right in the middle. It gives us a great geographical spread.”

He also pointed to the area’s reputation as a centre for the industry, which meant there was a strong pool of experienced candidates available for employment.

The announcement is the second piece of positive jobs news for the region’s call centre sector in recent weeks. Emax Outsourcing is aiming to recruit almost 300 staff before the end of the year at its call centre in the Cobalt Business Exchange in North Tyneside, and long term wants to take on nearly 2,000 people as it expands.

Around 55,000 of the region’s 1,141,000 workers – or 5% of the region’s working population – is estimated to work in call centres. There are more than 150 such centres in the region, accounting for 5% of employment, compared to 3.5% across the whole of the UK, according to One NorthEast.

ONE’s chief executive, Alan Clarke, said the arrival of The Listening Company was great news for the region.

“This is fantastic news for Newcastle and for the whole service sector, which is such an important part of the North East economy,” he said.

“We’re delighted that The Listening Company is making this significant investment in the region and we very much look forward to hearing about the plans in more detail in the coming weeks.”