Two Large Collection Agencies Announce Hundreds of New Jobs

In an employment environment where good news is increasingly hard to come by, two collection agencies separately announced major expansions Tuesday, adding hundreds of jobs to local economies that need the boost.

Local news service PressConnects.com ran a piece Tuesday on Nationwide Credit, Inc.’s (NCI) plans to add some 300 jobs to its office in Vestal, New York. Vestal is part of the greater Binghamton area near the border with Pennsylvania. NCI already employs 400 people at the location.

The company said that it was adding the jobs in response to new contracts from clients in the financial services and utility sectors.

The announcement comes at a good time for the area, as a major real estate company said just two weeks ago that it will be closing a call center in Vestal early next year, putting 225 people out of work.

In Tennessee, full-service collection agency Windham Professionals said it would be adding about 150 jobs at its facility in Alcoa in the Knoxville area. The company also said that it is hiring another 95 people to work at its regional headquarters in Hendersonville in suburban Nashville.

“The high quality of our current staff in both locations indicates to us that we have additional opportunity to grow our operations in Tennessee,” Erin Zaldastani, president and CEO of Windham, told WATE-TV. “It is gratifying to be made to feel welcome to these great communities.”

Windham, one of the 22 collection agencies on the Department of Education’s student loan debt collection contract, is relatively new to the Knoxville area. The company opened its office there in 2011 with an initial staff of 125.