Egghead To Fill Most New Jobs With Local Hires Moving Corporate Headquarters To Spokane Is Expected To Create More Than 150 Administrative Jobs

Egghead Software officials expect only 10 to 20 percent of the company’s current corporate headquarters employees to come along when the company moves to Spokane.

“This means another major hiring activity (in Spokane) for us,” Kurt Conklin, Egghead’s vice president of human resources, said Thursday.

The company announced Wednesday that it is moving its corporate headquarters from Issaquah to Spokane during the next six months. The 250 employees currently staffing the headquarters will be offered the opportunity to make the move to Spokane.

“But experience tells us that we’ll probably get a maximum of 15 to 20 percent of our employees to make the move, and maybe only 10 percent will come to Spokane,” Conklin said during a press conference at Egghead’s Liberty Lake facilities.

That means more than 150 administrative jobs, with salaries ranging from $30,000 to $60,000 annually, will be available.

Egghead came to Spokane in January when it closed 10 regional sales and service centers across the country and consolidated that operation in Spokane.

The company acquired 115,000 square feet of space in two buildings at the MeadowWood Business Park that were formerly occupied by Hewlett-Packard Co.

The service center operation involved about 130 people and only partially filled one of the buildings. In May, the company closed its mail order operations facility in Kalispell, Mont., and its credit and inside sales department in Issaquah, and shifted them to Spokane, bringing the local job count to about 335.

The first two groups of hires here involved sales and telephone work and carried salaries ranging from $16,000 annually to $30,000.

The next round of hiring will be “more professional support, administrative and managerial type positions,” Conklin said.

The company anticipates hiring 40 to 50 professional and administrative employees in its finance department, and about that many in its advertising and merchandising groups.

“We’ll be looking for some very sophisticated talent in our information systems group, which is a highly technical area,” Conklin said. “That will be another 40 to 60 jobs.”

Hires will also be made in the store operations, human resources, legal and administrative support areas.

The company will begin advertising for those jobs in local newspapers this weekend, and Conklin said, will conduct a series of job fairs for interested applicants. The initial job fair will be held around the first of August.

Conklin also announced that Egghead will open a retail outlet in Spokane by October. He said the outlet will be based on a new concept that involves both computer software and hardware. The first such store was opened in Beaverton, Ore., Thursday.

Egghead operates 130 retail outlets in 30 states.

When it came to Spokane in January, Conklin said, Egghead had no plans to move its base of operations from Issaquah. Spokane was competing with communities like Colorado Springs, Colo., for the services center and that’s all. The city won out, he said, primarily because it had the old Hewlett-Packard buildings available for sale at a good price.

Originally, Egghead planned to lease out the space it did not need.

But after hiring its first set of employees, Conklin said, the company discovered that Spokane’s labor force was all the economic recruiters had claimed it to be. They found plenty of qualified people available, and those they hired proved to be efficient. The work force was more stable than that in the Puget Sound region, and came at about 10 percent lower cost than the greater Seattle area.

The labor factor, combined with ample space, made company officials start considering the possibility of relocating completely.

“Critical mass is a factor,” Conklin said.

At a certain point, you get so much in one place, it makes sense to have everything there.

The cost of the relocation will be between $6 million and $8 million, Conklin said, but the savings potential more than offsets that cost.

The move, which will be complete by the end of the year, will be done in phases with the financial operations relocating here in September.

“We look forward,” said Conklin, “to being a very involved member of the Spokane community.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: JOB SEARCH Egghead will begin advertising job openings in newspapers this weekend. A job fair will be held in early August. No other information on applying for jobs was available Thursday.