By: Tina Cassidy

Nine years ago, when Harvard undergraduate John Chuang decided to form a temporary help agency that placed workers with Macintosh computer skills, his ideas was considered bold in an industry that had been providing nothing more than clerical and light industrial workers since its inception just after World War II.

Now Chuang, who has grown Cambridge-based MacTemps Inc. into a company with $40 million in revenue, is riding a trend he helped begin, offering even more specialized workers to the interim employment market and to emerging businesses across the state.

MacTemps has two new divisions, Enterprise and Portfolio, which temporarily place client-server computer technology experts and creative talent, such as graphic designers and those versed in multimedia.

"Definitely many, many firms are trying to get into the specialized, technical and professional ends of the [temping] business. It's something that's becoming very big," said Chuang, a 30-year-old New York native. "You find that professional people are the skilled, highly valued employees. But just as it doesn't make sense to overstaff on your warehouse workers, it doesn't make sense to overstaff your professionals."

And as corporate America realizes this, a dramatic shift is occurring: Doctors, lawyers, scientists, accountants and even chief executives can now be hired through temp agencies.

"Companies need flexibility at all levels of office work and sill levels. The workplace has become so specialized that they can't possibly have the right mix of employee skills to prosper," said Bruce Steinberg, spokesman for the National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services in Alexandria, Va. "The efficiency comes with not having to recruit, train, hire and possibly lay off later. Thy just can bring somebody in on a minute's notice."

Like outsourcing, companies use temporary professionals to save money. But unlike hiring an outside firm to run the mailroom, companies are relying on temps to complete work in their core line of business.

In 1991, the first year in which professional temporary help was measured by the National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services, clerical jobs comprised 48 percent of the industry. By last year, that figure had slipped slightly to 40 percent while the number of professional workers - including sales, marketing, management, accounting and legal services - rose during the same time period from 2.4 percent to 4.8 percent.

While the number is still relatively small, labor experts are projecting its growth to be exponential this year, as the temp industry - which saw a 26 percent overall gain last year - explodes.

Temporary work is even growing in places like Japan, where lifetime employment is part of the culture, and in some European countries, where temping was illegal until recently.

"It's exploding because it's really a great deal on both sides," Chuang said. "The employer gets a flexible workforce, a skilled work force, a work force that is variable, which helps with competitiveness. The employee gets a better lifestyle…they have a lot of choice over where they want to work and when they want to work."

Chuang admits that temping is not for everyone. But he does believe agencies like his, which offers its temps employee benefits, can take the stress out of the lives of those who might otherwise be working for themselves or retrain those whose skills may be a little rusty. And he agrees with the notion that temping is the ultimate meritocracy, where skills are king and office politics don't matter.

"This is more honest than what was happening in the '60s and '70s, in a age of giant corporations that promised job security." Chuang added. "That doesn't really work. That was an exceptional time in history when we had no world competition and everyone was coming off World War II."

Chuang, an economics major who also earned an MBA from Harvard, has 140 full-time employees and expects $55 million in revenue this year.

He has opened offices across the country and abroad, running into competition on both fronts from much larger temp agencies all vying for market share in this new niche.

For example, Milwaukee's $4 billion Manpower, which claims to be the world's largest temp agency and the country's largest private employer (based on its 775,000 W-2 tax forms) is beginning to send professionals to work after making its name in the clerical world.

The Calabasas, Calif.-based temp firm On Assignment says it employs 1,700 scientists and laboratory workers, making it the country's largest employer of workers in those professions. The company was founded by two scientists in 1985, had an initial public offering in 1992 at $7 a share and today its stock trades for about $18. The company has grown from $7 million in revenue in 1988 to $48 million last year, with 44 branch offices, according to chairman and chief executive Tom Buelter.

"It's phenomenal," Buelter said.

And in Stamford, Conn., IMCOR Inc. has been placing a range of business professionals, from managers to chief executives, since 1988.

"We anticipated, and I think appropriately so, that companies were going to be evolving more and more into the flexible work force and would need to have available highly talented people who would be on call immediately for a very flexible period of time," said chairman and cofounder John A. Thompson.

IMCOR employs 25,000 such workers - mostly middle-aged executives who have been let go from their previous jobs at no fault of their own - through five offices around the country, spending anywhere from a week to a year or more on one assignment.

"Some have golden parachutes and want to stay active. Some prefer longer-term arrangements but use it as a bridge," Thompson said. "The use of free-lancers, consultants, interim managers, has always been a factor. But this has been expanding substantially over the last three or four years."

While Buelter and others insist we are all temporary workers because few stay at the same job for a lifetime, most full-time workers don't need to fret, at least not yet. The number of temps in the nation's workforce is still only 1.6 percent, although there are other forms of nonfull-time employment.

The cradle-to-grave syndrome, in which an employee stays with the same employer for his or her entire career, is nearly obsolete.

"I don't think anyone thinks it exists today," said the temp and staffing association's Steinberg.

He cites US Department of Labor statistics that show 86 percent of job loss associated with the last recession was because of obsolete skills, compared to 56 percent of job loss with the previous recession.

"If job security isn't with the company," he added, "then where is it? The answer is it lies within the individual who gains new skills as needed."