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MESC winds down agency''s most successful recruitment project: more than 70,000 Nissan applicants processed.

Article Excerpt
When Mississippi Employment Security Commission (MESC) executive director Curt Thompson first met Nissan human resources manager Galen Medlin in mid-2000, he didn't know what potential project Medlin represented.

"Galen looked me in the eye and told me this employee recruitment project, if the state won it, would be the biggest thing that would ever happen in my whole life," said. "He asked me, 'How do you think you'll handle it?' and I said, 'Well, I just don't know.' The biggest project I'd handled so far was 12,000 to 15,000 applications for a single employer for a single recruitment. And I remember well when Galen told me this project could mean 100,000 applications. I thought, good gracious a-mighty, who could this be?"

A few months later, Thompson learned that he would head the single largest employee recruitment project in the agency's 67-year history. Almost before the first wave of applications for Nissan was processed, the company announced an expansion. All total, the international automaker would have 5,300 workers on site when the entire project was complete and the plant was fully operational.

It was a daunting task. For...

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