NCO Unit to Bring 800 New Jobs to Illinois Town

By Heath Hixson, Rockford Register Star

When MCI WorldCom announced in December 1999 that Rockford (IL) had beat out other cities as the site for a call center, the telecommunications giant promised to use its $7.3 million in state and local incentives to hire as many as 900 full- and part-time employees.

The company was true to its word, eventually hiring around 1,000 employees at the $15 million center at 7180 Spring Brook Road. And it even kept most of them employed while it handled the WorldCom debacle and a corporate bankruptcy.

But eventually, the number of employees at the call center in northeast Rockford dwindled. From late 2004 to October, when MCI sold the operation to Pennsylvania-based NCO Group, the number of employees fell to around 400.

Now, NCO Customer Management, a division of NCO Group, is promising that it will hire as many as 800 full- and part-time employees over the next year at the call center. This is in addition to the 400 or so employees that stayed with the call center through the ownership change.

For this complete story, please visit Call center could add up to 800 jobs.