Monster.com to invest $28M, bring 750 jobs to Florence

FLORENCE — Monster, an online job recruitment and careers resource, plans to invest $28 million and bring 750 jobs over five years through building a customer-service facility in Florence County.

Monster Worldwide South Carolina Inc. will open in September at a temporary location within the City Center, at 324 W. Evans St., Monster spokesman Steve Sylven said Thursday.

“It’s (the county’s) initial foray into the dot-com industry,” Florence County Council chairman Rusty Smith said. “I think that adds more glamour to Florence County.”

Maynard, Mass.-based Monster.com lets users post resumes and offers a database of jobs as well as career, money and education advice. The Web site’s database contains about 80 million resumes globally, Sylven said.

The Florence facility initially will have 350 employees, but will accommodate a growing staff over time, Sylven said.

The announcement comes less than a month after H.J. Heinz Co. revealed that it will open a Florence County plant.

Monster hasn’t confirmed the square footage of the company’s permanent Florence facility or where the operation will be located, Sylven said.

The process of bringing Monster to South Carolina lasted nearly a year but developed into “somewhat of a whirlwind” during the past two months, Smith said.

Florence County was one of 3,600 initial sites considered and, when the search narrowed, remained in the top three along with Aiken, he said.

The company will provide high-paying jobs and will offer a culture that “adds more diversity” to the county’s business community, said Joe W. King, executive director of the Florence County Economic Development Partnership.

Monster Training

Training for Monster’s Florence employees will be provided by readySC, a division of the S.C. Technical College System, according to a memorandum of understanding included in the resolution.

Clients of readySC include DuPont, Honda, GE, BMW and Michelin, according to the program’s Web site, http://www.readysc.org.

The program, formed in 1961, offers customized training at little or no cost to “new and expanding” businesses and industries in South Carolina, the Web site states.

To qualify, a company must project that it will create permanent jobs in a number large enough for the training to be cost efficient. It also must offer competitive wages and health insurance for its employees.

The company is not disclosing the salary ranges for the Florence employees, Sylven said.

County councilman Al Bradley said Monster will bring “much-needed” jobs and that the company’s hires won’t be limited to Florence County.

The investment “will make a real difference in the Pee Dee and along the economically depressed I-95 corridor,” U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina said in a statement.

Monster’s announcement follows less than a month after H.J. Heinz Co. revealed it will create 350 jobs at a new Florence County plant in the Pee Dee Electric Cooperative’s Touchstone Energy Commerce City. Heinz’s initial investment in the county will be $105 million, according to county documents.

“It shows that not only South Carolina, but (also) the Pee Dee is open for business,” Brian Kelley, Pee Dee Electric Cooperative’s vice president for marketing, said Thursday. “We’ve got a great team of people here; we’ve got a great community ... Finally people are starting to see that.”

Monster plans to start hiring locally in August, King said. The company said it will begin recruiting for the Florence jobs on its Web site within the coming weeks.

Monster’s North American customer service was previously outsourced to overseas third-party companies, but the Florence facility is being built in an effort to bring that customer service in-house, Sylven said.

Three existing North American customer service centers will remain open with the same number of employees, Sylven said. Those centers are in Indianapolis and Maynard, Mass., as well as Canada.

“Florence is an ideal choice for us because it’s a rapidly developing labor market with the talent we’ll need to bring best-in-class service to our customers,” Art O’Donnell, Monster’s executive vice president of service, said in a press release.

County council held a special called meeting Thursday to approve third and final readings of ordinances that would amend an agreement for a multicounty industrial park between Florence and Williamsburg counties and institute a fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreement for the project.

Council also adopted a resolution establishing the company’s inducement and millage rate.