Maintaining 100% staffing level priority for Madison County State’s Attorney’s office
By Randy Pierce • Efforts to stay fully staffed in the office of Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Haine, a high priority for him, are supported by a new one-year subscription agreement with an area marketing business administering a recruitment campaign for this purpose.
As approved by the county board judiciary committee recently, this $20,000 agreement with The Fource Group, LLC of O’Fallon, Illinois represents the second year in succession that this approach is being implemented because, according to Haine, his office was short by six (or about 20% of the total of 32 needed) qualified legal professionals to help handle the heavy case load there.
Possible candidates for hire “weren’t finding our postings,” Haine told the judiciary committee, which unanimously approved what has been defined as this purchase request, “so we had to kind of flip the narrative a little bit” by hiring The Fource Group to produce a fresh, new advertising campaign.
As a result, the Fource Group produced a professionally presented video of about a minute-and-a-half duration based on the theme of “Join Our Team” which is included on the Madison County State’s Attorney website and also, Haine said, supplemented with targeted ads which are all directed to individual TikTok and LinkedIn feeds of potential applicants while being additionally orchestrated to show up on Google searches.
“If you are an attorney in the St. Louis area,” Haine remarked, “you probably saw one of these ads because we spread them far and wide,” leading to a positive response over the past several months.
“Up until a couple of weeks ago, when we also lost an attorney,” Haine explained further, “we were fully staffed for the first time in my entire time as state’s attorney,” the apparent result of The Fource Group’s campaign.
In justifying the establishment of a new 12-month agreement with the same service provider, Haine said that, while the state’s attorney’s staff positions are currently all filled, he needs a “bench,” qualified individuals wanting to be a prosecutor who are “waiting in the wings that I can call as soon as I lose somebody else because people leave all the time with the big office.”
The money used for this most recent Fource Group agreement, he said, is actually present in his budget in the form of funds that were not spent last year. Haine said his preference is to have access to a group of attorneys who want to work for Madison County but have not received an offer due to the lack of open slots.
Doing this would mean, he added, “if I lose somebody, I call one of these people and they pick up right there.”
“We want to get ahead of the eight ball,” he went on, rather than behind it because “it takes a whole bunch of extra work for us to reach the attorneys and to convince them to consider us” then apply and be interviewed.
A focus on targeting candidates will be implemented around the time of state bar exams, Haine said, so that those passing, “get completely overwhelmed by advertising and they can’t help themselves but apply.”
Haine’s department’s website indicates starting attorney salaries of $75,000 annually and up to $100,000 based on the individual’s experience level.
The Fource Group lists among its clients the police departments in Belleville, Fairview Heights and Centralia plus both the police and fire departments in Granite City and O’Fallon.
The Madison County State’s Attorney’s office has been heavily involved recently in the prosecution of offenders in such high-profile criminal cases as the abduction of a woman in the parking lot of the Collinsville Starbucks who was taken to Troy and sexually assaulted and the deaths of three young people as a result of an explosion and house fire in rural Troy.
