SEATTLE — The United States Postal Service (USPS) is rolling out a four-state hiring blitz, hoping to fill 2,000 positions in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.
About half of those open positions are in Washington, with a heavy share on the western side of the state. The postal service will hold more than 50 job fairs on Thursday, April 13 across the state. The locations can be found here.
"We're just trying to bring in as many people as we can, and let people know we are actually hiring for careers, not just jobs but careers," said USPS Washington District Workforce Operations Planning Specialist Eden Ching. "Pay for the beginning is somewhere between 19-20 dollars an hour, and that's for your first 90 days of probation, and it can go up depending on what craft you decide to go into."
USPS is primarily hiring for letter carriers, clerks and mail handlers, with room to grow within the company.
"We have a ceiling that's so vast, you can go into anything you pretty much want to, not just management, but we also have other specialty jobs like the inspection service or something that has to do with operations support - if you're good with computers, if you're good with doing accounting," Ching said.
"All those jobs pretty much are within the United States Post Office and it's the only career I can think of where you can go to any state or territory and transfer."
Ching has worked with the USPS for three decades, and said the quality and culture of being able to move up and a drive for community and diversity has kept her there.
"It's one of our organization's greatest assets, is the people that we have," Ching said.
The agency hopes to hire 1,000 employees for the state of Washington in hopes of getting staffed up for the next peak time. KING 5 has covered the impacts of short staffing periods at some locations, along with calls by postal worker unions to increase staffing and distribute workload.
To learn more about positions with the USPS, click here.