A local staffing executive says: Don’t fret. In her world, things are looking up.

by Jess McCuan . photo by Matt Rose

Deborah Pressley started her 28-year career in the staffing biz with a phone call. But not in the way you might expect.

The Asheville native was 20 years old, working three jobs, and walked into a branch of the national staffing firm Uniforce. Two phones were ringing off the hook, and while she was waiting to be interviewed, Pressley picked up a phone and said, “Good Morning, Uniforce.” The owner, Betty Zeluff, hired her on the spot, and she stayed for five years.

She spent the next 23 years moving up the ranks at a locally-owned firm, Friday Staffing, which recruits for technical, clerical, professional and industrial jobs, including five of the area’s largest manufacturers. Ashevillean David Modaff and his family own the company, which was founded by David’s father, John Modaff, in 1987. The company now has three regional offices and around 700 temporary employees. It generates annual revenues of some $20 million.

That gives Pressley, 49, a front-row seat to see how local managers are behaving, despite harrowing national economic news and wild swings in the stock market. To be sure, Friday Staffing’s business (like most everyone else’s) took a hit in the fall of 2008. But since mid-last year, she says, she’s seen a steady increase in hiring of temporary workers, and a 50 percent jump in companies making full-time hires from the temporary pool. Three large plants—BorgWarner Thermal in Fletcher, BorgWarner Turbo Systems in Arden, and another area auto parts manufacturer—have hired full-time employees from her firm’s temporary pool within the last 60 days. Now, local companies are so sufficiently interested in recruiting upper management—the COOs and CFOs of industrial operations here—that Friday Staffing has added two professional white-collar recruiters to its own staff and is considering hiring a third.

Pressley, who would someday like to own Friday Staffing, is discouraged about the overall slide in the number of local manufacturing jobs, and she’s even more disappointed to see the steady loss of U.S. manufacturing operations to Asia and elsewhere. But she’s convinced that Asheville is such a desirable place to live and work that her firm will have plenty of business supporting entrepreneurs who live here or move their operations here. In her view, it’s a matter of retaining bright students from area universities and training them to do the work that innovative employers want. “We can’t live on tourism alone,” she says.