The Pearl District Founder Who Turned Portland's Talent Drain Into a Hiring Edge

Meridian Workforce Solutions, a two-year-old staffing and talent platform headquartered on NW 13th Avenue in the Pearl District, has placed more than 340 workers into permanent roles across Portland since January — a figure that puts it on pace to double its 2025 numbers before the year is out. The company's model, which pairs displaced tech workers with mid-sized manufacturing and logistics firms that have historically struggled to compete with the Amazons and Nikes of the hiring market, is drawing attention from workforce development offices across Multnomah County.

The timing matters. Oregon's unemployment rate edged up to 4.6 percent in May 2026, according to the Oregon Employment Department, outpacing the national figure of 4.1 percent and reflecting ongoing contraction in the state's technology sector following a wave of layoffs that hit companies concentrated along the Highway 26 corridor through Beaverton and Hillsboro. Intel alone announced 1,200 Oregon-based cuts in the first quarter of this year. That has left a significant pool of mid-career engineers, project managers and operations specialists looking for work — and not necessarily finding it through traditional channels.

Connecting Talent to Overlooked Corners of the Economy

Meridian's founder, Rosa Endelman, spent eight years as a regional director at Worksystems Inc., the publicly funded workforce development nonprofit that manages federal job training dollars across Multnomah and Washington counties. That background gave her a detailed read on where the structural mismatches in Portland's labour market actually sit. When she launched Meridian in April 2024 out of a co-working space in the Central Eastside Industrial District, her pitch to employers was specific: stop competing for the same narrow talent pool and let her team retrain candidates for roles they hadn't previously considered.

The company now works with 47 employer partners, including Zidell Marine on the South Waterfront, a family-owned metal fabrication business in St. Johns, and several food-processing operations in the Lents neighbourhood. Monthly placement fees run between $4,500 and $8,000 per hire depending on seniority — below the standard one-fifth-of-salary model charged by larger national staffing chains. Endelman has also structured a sliding-scale arrangement for businesses with fewer than 50 employees, which has helped her break into sectors that rarely engaged professional recruiters before.

Portland Community College's Workforce Development division began formally referring clients to Meridian in March, funnelling graduates from its Advanced Manufacturing program at the Cascade Campus on North Killingsworth Street into the company's pipeline. That partnership produced 28 placements in its first three months. The college confirmed the arrangement is being reviewed for renewal and possible expansion into the Healthcare Career Pathways program later this year.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Oregon's broader jobs picture remains uneven. Private-sector employment in the Portland metro grew by just 0.8 percent year-over-year through April 2026, according to the Oregon Employment Department's quarterly report released in June. That compares poorly to the 1.4 percent growth rate the region averaged between 2021 and 2023. Construction and healthcare are holding up; professional and business services are soft. The warehouse and logistics segment, which Meridian targets heavily, added roughly 600 net jobs in Multnomah County in the first four months of 2026.

Worksystems Inc. has been tracking Meridian's retention data. Preliminary figures show that 78 percent of workers placed by the company through mid-2025 remained in their roles at the 12-month mark — a meaningfully higher rate than the industry average of around 60 percent for comparable placements, a gap that employer-side clients say justifies the fee structure.

Endelman is expected to announce a second office, likely in Lloyd District, before the end of Q3. She has also applied for a $250,000 small business development grant through Business Oregon, the state's economic development agency, to fund a candidate pre-screening tool she says will cut average time-to-hire from 34 days to under 20. Employers looking to engage the firm can reach Meridian directly through the Portland Business Alliance's member referral network — a practical first step for anyone trying to hire in a market where the old playbook is clearly not working.