2,500 line up in Detroit for 500 Quicken jobs

12:43 AM, Sep. 18, 2011

The line of those looking for a job snaked around the Compuware building in downtown Detroit on Saturday, nearly 2,500 people hopeful to fill 500 spots at Quicken.

"It's organized chaos, because every person's different," Quicken senior client care specialist Peter Ferency said, in the middle of interviewing dozens of applicants for jobs in mortgage banking, information technology, property title work and marketing. "When you have 2,500 people, you don't want people to feel you're not giving them enough time. And that's hard to do."

But the company that managed to dodge economic doom and grow from 3,200 employees last year to 4,000 today tried hard. With upbeat attitudes -- and coffee, doughnuts, drinks and music for the thousands who showed up -- dozens of Quicken employees volunteered to come in on their day off to herd the crowd through the Compuware cafeteria.

Applicants waited about half an hour for a "Price Is Right"-like game show call over the intercom to meet with a recruiter.

"That's what I heard: 'Come on down!' " said applicant Bryan Eick, 24, a Michigan State University graduate from New Baltimore hoping for a job in finance or IT.

Robert Abaribe, 24, of Windsor, a video game developer interested in a Quicken position in mobile applications development, said the lines were not as bad as they looked.

"It wasn't that hard," he said, adding that he kept getting passed to other Quicken employees in the process. "The gentleman that interviewed me was very nice. And in actuality, I got interviewed three times."

The company was planning for 1,000 to 1,500 applicants, but estimated Saturday that about 2,500 people got in line for jobs in metro Detroit that pay between $40,000 and more than $100,000, said Matt Cardwell, Quicken's vice president of marketing.

"We really have positions right now open in almost every major area of the company," Cardwell said, partially attributing the need to low interest rates and the company's expansion into other areas of the mortgage industry. "We've just gone through a really great growth period over the past few years."

Kim Klein, 49, unemployed since being laid off from Chrysler Financial in 2009, drove in from Saginaw to get in line.

"Anything to get my foot in the door," he said, adding he heard positive things about the company.

Quicken's director of recruiting, Michelle Salvatore, said the company is glad to be filling positions in a city with high unemployment.

"We're so thrilled," Salvatore said. "It's not only jobs, but it's jobs in Detroit. We know that the stronger we build the downtown area, the more people that affects."


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