Company to lay off 370 workers, close Boise call center. Other firms interested in staff
A few days after Sykes Enterprises announced the purchase of a Florida millennial-focused finance publication, it informed 370 workers at its Boise call center that they will lose their jobs at the end of March.
The company’s digital marketing subsidiary, Clearlink, said last week that it will acquire The Penny Hoarder in a $102.5 million deal. Founded in 2010, Penny Hoarder is one of the nation’s largest personal finance websites, with millions of monthly followers.
On Tuesday, Sykes employees were told that the company will shut its Chinden Boulevard call center on March 31, putting its employees out of work, Sykes spokesperson Hayley Westwood said in an email. It also will lay off 200 workers at a call center in Las Vegas, she said.
The Tampa, Florida, company notified the Idaho Department of Labor of the Boise layoffs on Tuesday in a notice required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
“We anticipate that the layoffs will be permanent,” Donna Bluestone, the company’s North America vice president for human resources, wrote in the notice. “We, however, are working to transition as many impacted employees as possible to our virtual call center business, Sykes Home.”
Bluestone said she did not know how many employees might be offered that option.
The Department of Labor reached out to the company on Wednesday and offered to brief the affected employees on job-hunting services it provides. Those include “resume and job-search assistance, interview prep and access to training programs,” Labor spokesperson Georgia Smith said in an email. Those same services are available for anyone seeking employment.
“Earlier (Thursday) we heard from two companies that want to interview some of the people who are losing their jobs for several customer service vacancies,” Smith said.
Sykes is also working to find its laid-off workers new jobs.
“We’ve been in touch with more than five local Boise companies who are currently hiring,” Westwood said. “We’re actively working with them to set up virtual job fairs for our employees to find new opportunities.”
Three years ago, Sykes laid off 640 workers at its Boise call center, located at the former Hewlett-Packard campus now owned by the state of Idaho on Chinden Boulevard in northwest Boise. An unknown number of employees were laid off in March 2019.
Sykes opened its Boise call center with 300 employees in 2015. It took over the space previously leased by Maximus, a different call center company, which laid off 1,500 employees when it closed that year.
Besides operating call centers, Sykes also provides customer engagement services for clients, mainly in the financial services, communications, technology, transportation, leisure and health care industries, the Tampa Bay Times reported. The newspaper said it was the ninth-largest public company in Tampa Bay by revenue in 2019, with $161 billion.
Sykes said it expected to end fiscal 2020 with $1.7 billion in revenue, in a report expected to be released in March. The company reported a $70.2 million increase in revenue during the nine months ending Sept. 30, according to its latest financial report.
As of Jan. 30, 2020, the company employed 54,900 workers worldwide. The company operates 12 call centers in the United States, down from 28 in 2018.
