EP 68: Recruitment and Retention, Challenges and Ideas
It seems inconsistent: pandemic-related, record-level job losses while employers report their own hardships in finding workers. But that's the nature of what analysts have called one of the strangest labor shortages in memory. Nationally, employers have reported too-tight talent pools or general hard times retaining staff. While much of the labor-shortage news spotlight is usually either broad-talking or sector-specific, municipalities far and wide indeed have felt the effect. On this episode, we hear from a few on their unique challenges and ideas to improve their situations. And we've love to hear about yours.
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Transcript
This episode of Municipal Equation is brought to you by MedCost. MedCost balances the care of your employees with the financial health of your local government by offering flexible administration, best in class care management, cost containment strategies, health and wellness programs, access to a broad provider network, and exceptional customer service. MedCost. This is Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. This is Ben Brown with the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Thanks for joining us on another episode of Municipal Equation. On this episode, we're talking about recruitment and retention. The New York Times on 03/29/2022 put out an update on a topic I've been looking at here at the league, and that's what's being colloquially referred to as the labor shortage affecting all kinds of sectors. As the times reported, citing new data from the US labor department, job openings in February kept near record levels as the number of people quitting their jobs of their own volition grew. And that's a trend that's been on a continuation since I started looking at it late last year. And, yeah, it does seem inconsistent. You have these pandemic time record level job losses while employers report their own hardships in finding workers. But that's the nature of what analysts have called one of the strangest labor shortages in memory. Nationally, employers have reported talent pools that are way too tight or just general hard times retaining staff. While much of the news spotlight on the labor shortage is it's usually either broad talking or sector specific. But we know that municipalities far and wide have indeed felt the effect. I've seen the press releases from town halls about short staffs, not infrequently to the level of interrupting government services. In some cases, these are, announcements that come from town halls of temporary suspensions on activities like curbside pickup or public works activities. I was talking with Alex Frick, who's the public information officer with the city of Newton, about this topic. And he told me that suspending a popular service, like curbside recycling, is always one of the last options on the table. And for some context, when I talked with him a couple months ago about this, Newton had a good amount of positions open, half of which were in public works and utilities. This is even after the town raised the advertised hourly pay rate, which got me thinking about the general issue of recruitment and retention, which has flared up during the pandemic. We're about to talk to a couple of North Carolina towns who've been going through it and have tried to angle themselves more prominently in the job market, but also in appreciation of existing employees. That's coming right up. But let's zoom real quick over some North Carolina context. For some recent history, a 2021 report from the North Carolina Department of Commerce, specifically about the labor shortage confirmed far fewer job seekers than jobs available. To quote from the report, there were only 2.5 job seekers per job opening in North Carolina during the worst of the COVID nineteen recession in April 2020. That's far fewer than during the great recession and even fewer than during the economic boom times that preceded the recession. The commerce report goes on to say that as of May 2021, there was only one job seeker per job opening in our state, even fewer than prior to the pandemic. Similar trends are occurring nationwide. This arguably represents the most difficult hiring environment for employers in a generation or more. And consequently, this is the most promising labor market for job seekers within recent memory. End quote from the state department of commerce. And this jibes with the experience of a lot of North Carolina towns.
And, actually, we had started to see some problems in some key positions before COVID.
This is Annette Prevette Keller. She's the director of communications and marketing for the city of Kannapolis.
Of course, those were the police department. And then we were starting to see that in our streets and transportation department, water and sewer. And then with COVID, that problem just seemed to expand quite rapidly for us.
The pandemic and its employment trends seemed powerful enough, but even in good times, the Kannapolis area has a lot of other private employment opportunities that may look great to job seekers, adding to the predicament for local government hiring and retaining.
You know, we've been blessed to be in the Charlotte region, which is growing so quickly. Oh, yeah. And there are so many job opportunities. The unemployment rate is low, and there are so many new industries, new companies moving here that can pay higher wages typically than a municipality can. A variety of different jobs, you know, everything from working in our new industry, which was Gordon Food Services or Prime Beverage, where you can make a lot of money with sign on bonuses. You can work different shifts. You know, of course, Amazon is here. We have, I think, it's four or five different Amazon distribution facilities now. And as you know, they have such, you know, competitive pay. They offer free educational training and and all these things that can be quite difficult for us to compete with.
Right. And they can hire pretty quickly too.
Very quickly. Very quickly. Those kind of things, take us a little bit longer, to hire when we have to do all of our due diligence.
Allison Justice is the communications manager for Hendersonville,
which is seeing similar things. As everyone knows, some of these positions were challenging to fill even before the pandemic. Some of them involve a very specialized set of training skills and even just desire to serve in certain positions. We, like other municipalities across the country, have been faced with challenges, especially in our public safety departments. We're noticing, some vacancies there. But as you mentioned, our environmental services positions, we've had challenges keeping some of those filled, even some, mid level paraprofessional positions. And then our municipality also operates, water and wastewater utility. So some of our line maintenance positions, those come with challenges, finding the right type of people and getting them hired as well. What kind of things can
a city like Hendersonville do to try to remedy that situation?
We're finding that there's not a single simple answer to this to this, challenge that we're faced with.
While not simple and within contextual limitations, the rest is the story of North Carolina cities and towns doing more to stand out, in this case, to prospective employees while putting things in place to even better support current employees. Here's Keller with the city of Kannapolis, which just prior to the pandemic had done a salary study to better know the lay of the land. And then we went back and looked at
some key positions that we were having, some issues with that we saw that, you know, we weren't getting enough applicants or maybe not enough good applicants. So we went back and and sort of did a sub study on those, and we really are paying attention to the exit interview information. What why are people leaving us? Mhmm. What what's the draw that another firm may have to take, you know, that employee away from us? So we really tried to look at that problem and and be true to ourselves and figure out what are we doing or what can we do better. Right. And we also formed we also formed a committee. We're calling it the employee enrichment committee, and we really tried to get frontline staff, no supervisory staff on that committee to say, okay. What are some of the out of the box things that we can do that would help us be able to hire people as well as to retain people.
Knowing the lay of the land and understanding, you know, some of the dynamics, paying attention to the exit interview data, what what does the city decide to to do with that? Well, we first off, you
know, some of the easy things, I guess, is you budget some more money, raise some salary caps. We've looked at all of those things. We, of course, have had a combination of mayor increases and for, and cost of living increases in the last few years for employees. We looked at the four zero one k match, and we weren't as competitive as we could be there. So we've increased the percentage of a four zero one k match. Mhmm. We've increased the amount of money that we put, contribute in an HSA. We said we want our employees to be healthy, which ends up saving us with insurance premiums. And but we said, how can we help do that? Let's do some, you know, put some seed money and folks in their HSA accounts so they can do preventive care. And, if they do have something to make sure that they continue to get the care they receive. Mhmm. We've increased the number of paid holidays that employee receives, And we've also said, you know, an employee can take the day off in the month of their birthday. So that's another, you know, a nice, you know, little edge thing to do there. We've also looked at different things in certain departments where for police, for instance, there's been conversation that, you know, instead of we weren't on a established shift. You know, this person, John, is gonna work first shift forever or second shift, third shift. They rotated. So now after hearing some feedback from our officers, we've just implemented that. So people who wanna be on a first, second, or third and establish shift where they can get a routine, get a schedule staff established for themselves and their families, we've put that in place in the last couple of months. Okay. So we're really trying to, I think, listen and be flexible. Of course, you know, it's a a new day and age. Maybe this might be a little bit off topic, but, you know, we've seen things lately. And, you know, the the new folks that we're hiring who are much younger, who want more flexibility and, you know, in their work environment, and maybe what an employee that's already been here twenty or thirty years since, you know, we have to understand that there's a difference in those, generations and how we we need to adapt.
Hendersonville is also getting creative with its observations about workforce needs as well as retaining great hires. Here's Justice with the communications department.
The city council, in partnership with staff, has been attacking this, on a lot of different fronts. One of the things we've been doing with our strategy is doing more brand awareness about our city, the municipality itself, and the beautiful area we live in. So last year, we began working with a group to help develop some digital ads and some recruitment videos for our city jobs as a whole. We tried to focus on that campaign with, the great work life balance that people who work for the city of Hendersonville can have. They can not only work in a really supportive environment with a great community, but right outside their door, there's so many great recreational activities, kayaking, hiking. If you like the outdoors, it's a great place to live and work in Western North Carolina. So one of our campaigns focused on that, and we highlighted our employees. We we did a survey across our organization and found employees that had interesting extracurriculars. And, so one of our utilities engineers is an avid mountain biker. One of our police officers is a fly fisherman. One of our battalion chiefs, with our fire department, she loves hiking. And so we highlighted them inside and outside of work for the campaign. And that's been a really interesting way of pulling focus about not only the supportive organization, but also the things you get beyond just the job by coming to work at the city of Hendersonville. So that's been a really successful kind of dive into that area. We hadn't done a lot of job specific marketing before that other than, general job posting. So it's been really fun to work with our employees to develop this content. And now that we're moving into the second year of this initiative, we're just wrapping up some filming for a police specific video and a fire specific, video just because those public safety departments have their own unique challenges in terms of recruitment.
Is that gonna take, kind of a a similar approach to appreciating the the natural amenities that Hendersonville has and the ability to, you know, enjoy your life there, enjoy where you work, but also enjoy your life? It will have a component of that. And, also, one thing that came out of both these departments when we were brainstorming ideas was just the sense of the camaraderie, and,
we wanna highlight that in the videos too. Great community support for our public service agencies rose to the top in discussion. So they will have a component of the outdoor environment surrounding our city, but they will also dive into that support from administration and working with their brothers and sisters in blue or red or, you know, whatever the uniform to, protect our public. So, in the next few weeks, we should be seeing some some new marketing material on that on that topic too.
These towns and more are flexing a wealth of ideas pointed toward employees and hiring in light of the recent pandemic overlapping struggle. Justice said Hertown had just created a position focused on recruitment and retention. We had a relatively small HR department, and
we knew there was so much more work we could be doing in terms of recruitment and retention. So they hired they created a new position, and we have a new team member that actually this afternoon will be going to a career fair, and doing those extra steps that just time did not allow our our previous HR staff to focus on. So, our new staff member is more involved with, the posting of positions, orientation, onboarding new employees, and then also attending job fairs and and being more proactive in our recruiting approach and and where we're going to find applicants. So that's been a great addition to our team. It was definitely needed, and we're already seeing, you know, the benefits of having an additional team member that can spend time focusing on recruitment and supporting our existing employees that are already here.
Are are are you seeing results yet? I I know that, you know, that these things take time to to kinda show and improve, but are are you guys seeing certain positives, any certain indicators that,
that these initiatives are are paying off? We are. We still have some vacancies. Like like you said, this is not an immediate fix to a challenge that's facing everyone, but we have been seeing some of our open positions that were open for a while. We've been receiving applicants and have been able to fill those positions. We're also getting a lot more traffic to our hiring page websites. We're getting more applications, and we're starting to see a little more different type of applicants coming in. And so it's it's definitely paying off, but we we still have a long way to go in terms of we do have still have some challenging, vacancies to fill. We still, I think, have I think we were at three vacancies for patrol, but I I recently heard we, hired a new patrol officer in our police department. So we only have two vacancies now. So it's slowly chipping away and and filling those spots with with great people.
Now we know the behavior of the job market likely has a lot of factors, and we know the pandemic and the private market competitors and so on aren't the only things that local governments are dealing with when it comes to the workforce. One of the other cities I spoke with along the way, Albemarle, pointed out to me the challenges related to so many retirements. I'm going to explore that with them soon. This is a big topic, but I hope you either found some identity or common interest in what we've covered here or got a new idea to try in your city or town, or got a new conversation starter, or maybe you got inspired to write in and let me know what creative things you've been doing to respond to a dry job market or to retention issues or to the retirement way. That's an interesting one I would love to explore with you. You can write to me at bbrown@nclm.org. That's bbrown,asinBenBrown,@nclm.org. On this topic or any other you think would make a good episode of Municipal Equation, this is the podcast about cities and towns adapting to change, and it comes to you from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. We'll be back with another episode. Thank you for listening. This is Ben Brown.