Towers Watson, a professional services company that operates the nation’s largest private Medicare exchange, will hire 700 people who will work through year-end during the Medicare open enrollment season.
The positions include full-time, temporary benefit advisers; customer service representatives; data processing employees; training specialists; compliance representatives; operations supervisors and managers who will work at the company’s operations center at 10975 S. Sterling View Drive, Suite A1, South Jordan.
“We are expanding and hiring 700 people in the Greater Salt Lake area, mainly for our operations center in South Jordan,” said Bryce Williams, managing director of Towers Watson’s Exchange Solutions. “We’ve also expanded in that [South Jordan] facility and taken essentially the vast majority of the building. This follows on the heels of the real estate expansion and some expansion happening in our business.”
Extend Health pioneered the first private health exchange in the nation for retirees of Chrysler Corp. Williams said the concept of health exchanges has continued to grow. “What’s happened is, the project of doing a conversion for Medicare retirees at major corporations is really catching fire now, so we’re staffing up to essentially meet client demand,” he said.
The company has grown so that it has completed conversions for retirees at Chrysler, Ford and General Motors and also for Medicare retirees at about 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
Towers Watson has 87 carriers on its exchange, with agents using the company’s tools, training and its propriety customer relations management tool to help seniors with their Medicare election. Williams said that last October alone, the company logged 18 million minutes of phone time talking to seniors.
The seasonal positions will run from mid-August to the end of December. Benefit advisers can get bonuses on top of their per-hour pay, and the company typically retains up to 25 percent of those workers for full-time, permanent employment.
“We were founded in Utah, starting in Park City,” Williams said. “We found that it was just too hard to get folks to go up the canyon. Then we were just below Foothill Drive and we outgrew that space. Then we were in Sugar House and we outgrew that space. Then we opened our large call center in South Jordan. The Enterprise
