Election season's early start good news for Reno center

You may greet the oh-so-early start of the 2008 presidential election season with a heavy heart, but you can take comfort in the knowledge that it's helping out the northern Nevada economy.

Opinion Research Corporation, you see, figures the early start of the election season is nothing but good news for its Reno call center after the company signed a partnership deal to provide polls for CNN.

The increased business is likely to result in staffing increases at the Reno center, which currently employs 135.

"As we get closer to the 2008 election, the need will absolutely increase," says Jeffrey Resnick, managing director for Opinion Research Corporation USA.

The surveys conducted by Opinion Research from its centers at Reno and Tucson will be branded as the "CNN/Opinion Research Poll."

The work for CNN is the only political polling that Opinion Research will undertake. Since April, the company has been doing some flash overnight polls for CNN gathering opinions of people nationwide after last week's State of the Nation address, for instance.

The other work at the Reno center ranges from customer-satisfaction surveys to polling of high-level executives and market research for medical companies.

The call center doesn't do sales calls.

"It's a great place to work because you get to talk to Americans from all walks of life," Resnick says.

The center, which opened as a 12-seat call center in a 1,400-square-foot facility in 1990, now occupies 6,900 square feet with 77 work stations.

"We like the workforce in Reno," Resnick says.

Recruiting the staff to handle a growing workload at the center requires a long-term and focused effort, says Lisa Mancini, an operation manager for data collection with the company at Reno.

Recruitment strategies, she says, include efforts to keep the company visible in the community, creation of a competitive pay and benefits structure and payment of recruitment bonus to existing employees who bring in new workers.

Based at Princeton, N.J., Opinion Research is a unit of infoUSA, a publicly held database company.