The Search for Talent
Companies across the state are exploring new methods of finding qualified employees as the demand for workers reaches a 20-year high

"The best social program we have is an economy where jobs are looking for people instead of people looking for jobs."
—Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers
U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 31, 2000

ACCORDING to the U.S. Labor Department, by 2008 there will be 161 million full-time and part-time jobs, but only 147 million people to fill them. It’s only 2000, but many companies are already feeling that crunch. Finding and nurturing talented people is a constant challenge, exacerbated by the current heady economy. According to a February survey by Manpower Inc., demand for workers is at the highest level in more than 20 years.

What strategies are firms adopting to solve this persistent problem? How is the culture of work changing to accommodate worker and company needs alike in a time of record employment?

Finding workers in Northern Kentucky

"In Northern Kentucky, it’s been projected that if we hold our growth as it is right now over the next six to seven years, we will be short about 7,000 more skilled people every year." said Bob Richards, director for the Workforce Development Collaborative of the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. "That’s about 50,000 people.The number one issue with the workforce is we have a good economy and fewer young people to fill the jobs."

One option companies have in meeting this recruitment challenge is job fairs. The Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper and Kaplan Career Services recently partnered to present a Tri-State Career Fair at the Sharonville Convention Center in Cincinnati. The February 22 event was the first of six career fairs scheduled for 2000.

"We do very well at job fairs," said Jay Secrist, a human resources representative at the Lexis-Nexis booth. "Our plant is only 20 minutes from Cincinnati and about 35 minutes from Northern Kentucky."

In addition to traditional methods of recruitment, Lexis-Nexis, a computer software company, has embraced their own technology and found a new place to find prospects.

"We’ve recently gotten on a new Web site called techies.com," said Secrist. "It’s a professional, technical Web site where people are not necessarily looking for a job...but they can go in and we have positions posted on there strictly for technical positions. We’re able then to hone in a little better to that type of market."

Helping people and jobs find each other is a community-wide effort in the Northern Kentucky area. Frank Hill, director of membership benefits and computing for the Cincinnati chapter of Black Data Processing Associates, BDPA, helps provide such a service.

"There’s a disparity in lots of areas regarding access to computing and the Internet, just knowledge of the technology available in the African American community," said Hill. "Our group spends a lot of effort in training, giving seminars, having luncheons, and summer computer camps for high school children. We also invite technology speakers in to talk to our group about the latest things going on in their field," he explained.

The Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce has created programs like Best Partners, where the chamber and the Superintendent’s Association of Northern Kentucky work together to "bridge the gap between education and the private sector."

There is also the Northern Kentucky Works Project, an entry level, poverty-to-work project that reaches out to the underemployed.

"We try to reach out to those folks and challenge them in the opportunities that are out there, and provide programs that help get them into a learning mode so that they can qualify for these jobs," said the Project’s Bob Richards.

How do they find people?

"We run advertisements, post things at the One Stop Centers, at the Housing Authority – any place we can find people looking for entry level jobs. The biggest challenge of this program is getting the word out. We need people in that career path, because industry is growing so fast."

Looking for labor in Louisville

With the unemployment rate in Louisville staying just below three percent, local employers say it is an employees’ market when it comes to finding jobs. Companies scrambling to find workers face serious competition from some heavy hitters.

In the face of high salaries offered by automobile maker Ford and educational opportunities offered by United Parcel Service (see accompanying article), many companies are revamping their approach to finding and keeping workers.

Brenda Schissler, vice president of business development for HR Affiliates, a staffing company, said the areas of greatest need in Louisville are entry level positions and skilled/technical labor.

"We have plenty of management and administrative folks," said Schissler, adding that hiring pressures have caused companies to raise their entry-level pay, develop on-site training and consider perks such as those offered by Louisville-based Brown-Forman Corporation, which include amenities like an on-site beauty salon.

Ron Harmon, vice president of Baptist Hospital East, said the healthcare employment market is especially tight in Louisville, a city known as a regional medical center. He said the companies often trade employees, who move from hospital to hospital enticed by hiring bonuses. In order to gain a competitive edge, Baptist is investing in training programs for employees.

"We are taking folks off the street and training them to be nursing assistants and developing a career path for them. We are putting a tremendous effort into developing folks that we used to be able to just recruit," said Harmon.

The company also offers courses in English as a second language for its environmental service workers, many of whom are refugees. Baptist has also increased its strategic alliances with area colleges, going directly on campus to "wine and dine" students who will graduate with skills in radiology. Right now, the hospital faces a shortage of 20 full- and part-time critical care nurses. Referral bonuses and sign-on bonuses are used to recruit these hard-to-find professionals: Employees who refer a critical care nurse get $1,000; critical care nurses receive a $3,000 sign-on bonus for joining the company.

"I expect the problem will persist for the next three to five years. I think companies will begin to tap into the aging workforce and develop flexible working arrangements," Harmon noted.

Corvus Digital Solutions Inc., a multimedia production firm, also has trouble finding personnel with specialized, technical skills. Corvus has hired between two and four people a month over the past year and currently has four open positions. Keith Hall, president and CEO for Corvus, said his company is working to strengthen its connection to universities, particularly the University of Louisville. The company’s senior vice president of technology, Andy Cobb, is a graduate of the Speed School and maintains contact with the school to recruit new employees.

One technique employed at Corvus may explain the recent national glut of mergers – Hall said the company has built its staff through acquisitions of other tech firms. The company gained five employees when it merged with Emerge LLC, an information technology firm.

"There are lots of advantages to getting employees this way:You can see the work they have done as a team, they have equipment, and they come with projects already underway. The harder part is getting them to interact with a new team," observed Hall.

A sense of community

In many eastern Kentucky industries, a strong sense of community is a common thread that attracts potential employees. Most industry leaders in the mountainous regions of the state estimate that close to 100 percent of their employee base comes from the immediate vicinity.

"I can be safe in saying that 99.8 percent of our employees (excluding doctors) are from areas of the region," says Lois Baker, CEO of Mountain Comprehensive Health Care in Whitesburg. "There’s not a single RN here who is not a native."

In a region characterized by strong family ties, it’s little wonder that a sense of community would naturally arise in the industrial and commercial world. For the most part, this hometown team spirit has evolved with little input from management. A question remains, however: Can this atmosphere be created or enhanced, or is its existence mere happenstance?

More and more corporations in eastern Kentucky are beginning to recognize "hometown pride" and build upon it. R/S Body Company, Inc., a manufacturer of custom truck bodies, actively promotes the sense of community in two ways: aggressive marketing and employee growth.

"When I first came on board my first goal was to never lay anyone off," says Hank Wilson, Sales Manager at R/S. "Lay-offs disrupt the family in a small community so much, you never recover from something like that."

Through aggressive marketing, R/S has indirectly prevented otherwise necessary lay-offs and thereby held the family together, so to speak.

"We’ve taken out a lot of those peaks and valleys by aggressively attacking the South, where we had never really been before," explains Wilson.

A second method by which a sense of community is encouraged is by actively promoting the personal and professional growth of employees.

"Let people know they’re part of the organization," says Paul Gearheart, president of Gearheart Communications in Harold. Gearheart provides both on-the-job and specialized training for their employees to ensure that a high level of employee potential is achieved.

A major component of the professional growth of R/S Body’s employees is regular meetings, in which the corporate vision is shared with the entire workforce.

"There are all these old clichés about empowerment," says Wilson, "but I think it’s education. I think it’s letting everybody, from the top to the bottom, know what the plan is."

Does your company say "Wow!"?

As excellence guru Tom Peters puts it, the only projects that are really worth doing are "wow" projects – the kind that use innovative technology to do something original, the kind that ignite passion in people. And in a time when companies are seeming more like extended projects than high-walled, secretive institutions, being a "wow" company doesn’t hurt in attracting talented people either.

Among the latest flood of e-commerce companies in central Kentucky is e-campus.com, a strong online presence in the textbook and campus bookstore field. Human resources director Susan Ayers describes the challenge of finding IT talent in today’s marketplace.

"It is a daily battle – it’s incredibly competitive," she says. "You can go to any of the major Internet job posting sites like monster.com or headhunter.net … and you’ll get just any number of people looking to move and willing to change jobs, but at the same time, they’re very particular. They can command the top salaries and they can live in all the best places.

With today’s dotcom valuations, part of what makes their compensation packages attractive is stock options. But beyond the standard methods of finding good people directly, ecampus.com has benefited from using outside help, both in searching for talent and in performing the actual work.

"Outsourcing is terrific," says Ayers. "We’ve used it in a lot of different ways. For instance, we have consultants or contract laborers come in and help just for a specific period of time, especially in the very technical things where we need someone very quickly who’s already up to speed, who can just come in and work for a few weeks or a couple of months and then they’re gone.

"They are only temporary jobs, but we have been able to find a number of people through temporary agencies that are extremely talented and have brought them on full time. The recruiting agencies and the temp agencies have been great, because they have their hands on the market. They’ve done the advertising, pre-screening, and all of that."

That’s what people like Jackie Howard, founder of Alliance Staffing in Lexington, do. The three-year-old company has several hundred professionals and technical savants on its roster at any one time, as the company looks to place people in the best possible setting for all concerned.

"Most of our placements are temporary-to-permanent or permanent. It’s taken me longer to develop Alliance Staffing because we’ve been so specialized. But we have doubled sales each year we’ve been in business. It’s a slow process, but the goal isn’t to be the biggest, just the best."

Much of Alliance’s workload involves placement of spouses of professionals already relocating to central Kentucky. That means networking is key – with employers, relocation specialists and real estate agencies. The agency recruits at colleges in Kentucky, chamber events, Business Link, and the annual Society for Human Resource Management conference.

"At schools, we look for people with computer science, marketing or accounting degrees. We also get a lot of referrals from people we place in jobs, who refer their friends to us," Howard adds.

But Howard notes that school degrees may not carry the weight they used to.

"What I’ve found, quite frankly, is that a lot of technical people are self-taught – they don’t all have a college degree, and that’s really not important in the technical market," she says. "Certifications and experience are more important than a tech degree, and that’s what I’ve seen change over the past few years."

For all careers today, the need for flexibility and multiple hat-wearing will continue to be paramount. Like many other firms, ecampus-com strives to emphasize cross-training in the workplace, getting the best and the most out of multi-tasking, multi-talented people. That’s especially crucial in evolving companies, where projects often outpace job descriptions.

"It’s very much the case that the clients sometimes need help determining their needs themselves," observes Howard. "That’s why we tell all our applicants that they need to be flexible and open and willing to change."

And as one new employer in Lexington can attest, you have to be willing to follow your passion.

"Every single one of these people is more talented than what they’re getting paid," reports Alan Stein, president of Lexington Professional Baseball Company, soon to be the vehicle for a Double-A minor league team and stadium. "At last count, we had 1,100 resumés, e-mails and inquiries for jobs on this project, all for just 25 full-time jobs. We interviewed 125 people. I know there’s a worker shortage, but we interviewed a lot of incredibly talented people.

"Even in an almost zero unemployment environment, I still get a few calls every day," says Stein. "People want to work in this project because it’s fun, but more importantly because we’re building something. Every one of these people will look back in two or three years and say ‘Wow, I helped do that.’ We’re making history here, and you can’t put a price tag on that."

Adam Bruns is editorial director of The Lane Report. Tina Hines is a photographer and writer based in Northern Kentucky. Phillip Meeks is a writer based in Betsy Layne, and Ellen B. Morris is a Louisville-based writer.

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UPS and Schools Deliver Unique Solution

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