List May Hang Up on Telemarketers' Jobs

Aug. 4 -- — You used to hang up on them. Then you stopped them from calling up altogether. Now you may have put them out of a job.

The telemarketing industry, targeted directly by the new national Do Not Call list, says it could soon see as many as half of its estimated 4.1 million workers unemployed.

Part of the reason is the unexpectedly fast start for the Do Not Call registry. Just one month into the new federal program, 28.7 million phone numbers have already been registered as of late July. Telemarketers have until Oct. 1 to remove those numbers from calling lists.

And with all the publicity surrounding the creation of the list, telemarketers are already feeling squeezed.

According to Jim Moylan, president of telemarket hiring outfit Call Center Jobs, people who used to politely put up with telemarketers have gotten more frustrated. "On a program where you used to get 12 people to answer the phone every hour, now you're getting eight," Moylan said.

The change is no small matter. Consumers spent more than $100 billion in 2002 via outbound telemarketing, according to the Direct Marketing Association in New York, and in the last 12 months, 66 million people have used it to purchase at least one product.

Another Hit for Job Market

With up to 65 million people expected to sign up for removal from most calling lists, revenues will drop dramatically, predicts Tim Searcy, executive director of the American Teleservices Association in Washington, D.C. When that happens, he says companies will have to make layoffs to reduce costs.

Moylan, whose company runs a job posting Web site for the telemarketing industry, says in the next 90 days he expects to see an increase in the number of job-seekers posting résumés. "So far we've seen a small increase, but I'd expect to see that go up to 15 percent [by October]," he said.

The timing of the implementation is especially harmful for the job market, said Roland Rust, chair in marketing at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business in College Park, Md. "If this were three or four years ago when the unemployment was really low, then it wouldn't have had much effect. But right now these folks don't have a lot of alternatives."