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Roy Aboody, president of Stratham-based Staffing Sense Photo:  Michael McCord

"I think the days of mass hirings are over. We are seeing more examples of long-term temporary use. Everybody's looking at the bottom line." Roy Aboody

The arrival of a robust Internet was supposed to change everything in the employment arena. After all, who needs a local temp or staffing agency when the new boys on the block like Monster.com or hotjobs.com or any number of newspaper-related, Web-based employment classified sites could handle the load? Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the future that would change everything. It seems that some fundamentals never go away.

"You can't take away the person-to-person touch," said Roy Aboody, the president of Stratham-based Staffing Sense, about the filtering function that temporary employment agencies provide. "There's no shortcut to good hiring." Those vital functions include personal interviews with prospective workers, reference checks and matching workers and their skills with the right jobs. It seems that what the Internet did was provide the ability for all kinds of people to apply for positions, but those vast numbers also swamped already strained human resources departments.

"It's like picking needles out of haystacks," Aboody said of the resume deluges that businesses of all sizes experience when posting a job.

Another industry veteran said if anything, the technology has increased the need for top-notch employment agencies. "I've been in this business over two decades, and one lesson I've learned again and again is that you can't fit square pegs into round holes," said Robert Thiboutot, the president of RGT Associates, a professional recruiting and placement firm.

In another reflection of the growing diversity of employment agencies, RGT Associates works side-by-side with the local Westaff franchise, which Thiboutot purchased when his own temporary agency came under extreme financial stress during the recession of the early 1990s. His agency wasn't the only one threatened with extinction. Thiboutot estimates there were more than 500 agencies in the Boston and northern New England region, but the severity of the downturn, along with countless mergers, left around 83 standing. "It was tough. I could see that we were going to have continual difficulty making payroll," Thiboutot said of his decision to hook up with a national employment agency that had plenty of resources. Thiboutot then split off his own executive recruitment agency, but the businesses share an office suite in Portsmouth. Westaff's business development manager, Michael Guenard, said his firm services the manufacturing, junior engineering and technical sectors as well as administrative help.

"It goes in cycles," Guenard said about the employment cycles and industry sectors' needs.

Westaff's current client list is between "60 to 70 percent" manufacturing and technical, he said.

Whatever sector is in play, there is no shortage of temporary workers for the tens of thousand of agencies in the country. According to the American Staffing Association trade group, there are an estimated 3 million temporary workers on the job every day across the United States, a number that continues to grow. Overall, an estimated 12 million different Americans will work in one temp position or another annually. The ASA estimates that the staffing industry will outpace growth in almost every other sector at 3.8 percent rate and add 1.6 million jobs through 2014. What all employment agencies have in common is a dire need for qualified workers. During a peak year, Guenard said Westaff will deploy as many as 1,000 workers and has a database of 1,700 applications. But it's not enough, sometimes due to the fact that its workers are good enough to merit full-time employment and benefits.

"We are happy for them," said Ginette Thiboutot, the Westaff manager and Robert's wife. "But it's hard to find good people who are conscientious, show up on time and work hard."

Roy Aboody, at Staffing Sense, opened his business in June 2001 after buying out a former partner. He struggled through the recession and 9/11 economic downturn, and said his business is all the better for those early struggles.

"We learned how to be resourceful," said Aboody, who came into the staffing industry after working on Wall Street and as a banker for the former Fleet Bank. It's ironic that Aboody and agencies like his are leveraging the very technology that was supposed to have rendered them obsolete to become far more productive and lean. "We are doing far more work than we used to with the same amount of staff," he said of his staff of five, which handles clients seeking clerical work. Aboody said business is growing in the staffing industry because businesses are reluctant to rapidly expand their full-time employee base.

"I think the days of mass hirings are over," he said. "We are seeing more examples of long-term temporary use. Everybody's looking at the bottom line. I believe 9/11 changed a lot, because everyone knows things can change in a heartbeat and big companies don't want to have to make large hiring decisions until they have to." Staffing Sense does some mid-level executive recruiting, but Aboody said he hopes to vigorously expand that part of the business because the same fundamentals apply to separate the pretenders from the contenders. Aboody is "cautiously optimistic" about the future and believes his company has positioned itself well enough to expand when necessary. "Because of technology and our flexibility, if one of our larger clients like the National Passport Center asked us if we could provide the same services at another location, I would consider opening a satellite office," he said. One aspect of the business that Aboody doesn't think will change, especially in the Seacoast region, is the personal relationships that develop between agency and client.

"You can do business with a handshake here. People like to deal with you face-to-face. That's true for most of New England, but I think it's especially true of the Seacoast. I love working with people and being on the front line. But I don't think this style would work in New York or Boston." But the personal contacts afforded in the Seacoast also bring an extra-added level of responsibility.

"This is a very competitive business, and we have to be very good in what we do," Robert Thiboutot said about his firm's vetting practices. "We can't afford to send a client the wrong type of worker. If you just try to send them a body, they'll know it and there's always another agency down the street."