In an earlier effort to find employees, he had joined with other small manufacturers in the St. Johnsbury area to offer a 16-week basic course in machine work at a local high school. The course hasn't made Benoit happy yet. During the program's first five years of operation, he has hired only six of its graduates. But people are moving out of the area or taking better-paying jobs, and few young people are interested in machine work. Last year the course attracted only 12 students, all of them workers with some experience who were looking to upgrade their skills. Even at peak capacity, the program turns out a maximum of 30 graduates a year, hardly enough to supply the region's half a dozen manufacturing companies, which employ more than 500 people.
So Benoit still has to hunt far and wide for recruits. Because he was shorthanded last year, he says, he had to turn down business, which cost him about $100,000 in revenues. "I could use 10 people right now," he says.
While Benoit looked outward for help, John Boyce turned to his managers to find workers for his company, Janitron. He deployed as many as four managers to hand out business cards, along with directions to Janitron, on bus routes with easy access to the company's St. Louis headquarters. But the bus roundup yielded only a handful of employees for his janitorial service, he says, and he abandoned the strategy after trying it on and off for a year.
Last year he initiated a referral bonus as an incentive to his rank-and-file employees to recruit workers. But the program didn't take off until last summer, Boyce says, when he offered a $100 referral bonus to his building managers and supervisors, too. In short order that strategy yielded 47 entry-level hires for his 225-employee company. Revenues last year were $2.6 million, and he considers that the $4,700 in bonuses was money well spent. What's more, there's a built-in guarantee in Boyce's bonus offer. To enhance the prospect that his new hires will stick around, Boyce pays the referral bonus only if a worker remains in his employ for at least 90 days.
To recruit and retain the workers that he needs in his two Allegra Print and Imaging locations, in Tulsa, Jerry Holder has devised a different strategy. The past 2 or 3 years have been "the worst" period for recruiting in his 15 years in business, says Holder. "I was having trouble getting people to even fill out an application," he recalls.
Several months ago he began placing what he calls "friendly" newspaper ads for job openings in his sales, production, and quality-control departments. The ads evoke a genial, welcoming spirit. "Let's see if it fits. Come in, see the place" is how Holder sums up their message. From the first encounter that job candidates have with the company, he courts them with red-carpet treatment. No matter how low level a job may be, the reception is the same. Holder escorts each prospect on a shop tour, with introductions to key employees.
Using the tender approach for three months last year, Holder hired two people. He believes both will stick around for the long haul. For the new hires and his 23 other employees, no matter what their rank, he has printed up business cards. In Holder's view such symbols of respect are important. To promote recruiting and retention in his $2.3-million company, Holder says, he has "gone overboard" in offering his workers benefits, including company-subsidized health insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, and tuition reimbursement.
Because Pam Medlin's yearly recruiting quota dwarfs the requirements of business owners like Holder, she felt her heart drop in tandem with the unemployment rate in Greensboro several years ago. How could she find all the workers that her temporary-placement agency, Key Resources Inc., provided to her corporate clients every week? (The number of employees is now up to 1,200.) She grasped for the only ready supply of unemployed people within reach: immigrants who had settled in the Greensboro area. Before long she was spending her Sundays recruiting workers at the Hispanic and Vietnamese churches in the area. "You get one person a good opportunity, a good job, then they tell their friends. The next day, you have four people showing up," she says.
Still, she found employers reluctant to take on workers who couldn't speak English. Medlin tracked down translators. "I would walk into a Hispanic grocery store and say to someone, 'You seem to speak English well. Would you translate for me?" When a translator is needed for no more than a day or two to explain, say, a repetitious manufacturing task, Medlin's company pays for the service. For more complicated tasks, Medlin hires a translator for an entire project, and the employer pays the worker's salary because he or she also has other duties on the project.
The immigrants she has recruited have "a good work ethic and low turnover," says Medlin, who regards immigrant communities as an important source of labor in the nation's economy. In fact, immigrants, who now make up 12% of America's workforce, have come to dominate the low-skilled job sector, according to Demetrios Papademetriou, codirector of international migration policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Not that the jobs are always such a great deal for the newcomers themselves. Immigrants are particularly at risk of being exploited by some unscrupulous employers who may pay them less than the minimum wage or not compensate them for overtime work, according to Papademetriou.
