Smartmatic to hire 48,000 for elections

Some 48,000 locals will be hired by the Smartmatic and Total Information Management (TIM) for a couple of weeks to assist in the country’s first automated elections in 2010, a company executive said. Smartmatic-TIM would hire 42,000 Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) technicians, 4,000 supervisors, 2,000 canvassing and consolidation technicians and 600 call center agents, Gene Gregorio, spokesman for the joint venture firm, told The Manila Times on Saturday.

Smartmatic-TIM is the provider of the optical-scan machines that will be used to fully automate the 2010 national elections. The joint venture won the bidding procedures conducted by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) earlier this year.

Gregorio said that the company partnered with “three or four local manning agencies” for the recruitment of the workers, although he did not disclose which companies.

Skills needed

The spokesman also said that undergraduates of information technology and engineering courses may apply for the positions, as well as fresh graduates, since no prior work experience would be required.

An in-house training group would be responsible in training the workers for the tasks required, he added.

“This is a standard procedure for Smartmatic in any electoral process—that they hire local workers and train them,” Gregorio told The Times.

He added that applicants may start sending their resumes and application letters to the manning agencies as early as today since the manpower contractors have started recruiting applicants last week. But Gregorio told The Times they would decide this week where the resumes should be sent.

Smartmatic-TIM hoped to start the training program in January of next year, Gregorio said.

“It [training] will just be for a few days,” he said, adding that all hired workers will be receiving an allowance from the company once they start training.

The technicians and supervisors would be deployed to different areas nationwide as early as when the field testing for the machines begins, Gregorio said.

He also said that the company would set up a separate facility for the call center agents.

He added that it was up to the Comelec to decide on the deployment of the 2,000 supervisors, since the deployment would depend largely on the final number of cluster precincts. “That will be determined by Comelec . . . it has to be finalized first—the number of cluster precincts from municipal to provincial.”

14 days of work

All hired technicians, supervisors and call center agents of Smartmatic-TIM will only be working for the company for 14 days, from the training period to the transmission of voting results is finished, which is about 48 hours after voting precincts close on election day.

Gregorio said, however, that since the workers would only be hired for a short period of time, the salary “would be reasonable but not that much.” He added that the salary has yet to be set by the company. –Bernice Camille V. Bauzon, Reporter, Manila Times