‘Definitely Not As Dark and Gloomy’ Local staffing crises eases ...

By Craig Manning

“Things are getting better.”

When it comes to the staffing situation in northern Michigan, employers are happy to say or hear those words.

Rob Hanel doesn’t use those words lightly, either.

Hanel, who serves both as the director of people and space for TentCraft and as the newly elected president of the Traverse Area Human Resource Association (TAHRA), has been with TentCraft for seven years.

He has seen firsthand the unprecedented roller coaster of challenges that local employers have faced in finding, recruiting, hiring, onboarding and retaining top talent. First, in 2019, a booming economy and some of the lowest unemployment rates in American history had employers competing harder than ever to land top hires.

Then, 2020’s pandemic forced employers to lay off or furlough valuable employees, shift to remote work structures, and in some cases, adopt entirely new business models. Later, the Great Resignation saw a an historic shuffling of talent – and forced organizations to rethink their HR strategies altogether. panicking, and in early 2022, you saw lots of organizations and industries do things like across-the-board entry-level wage increases,” Hanel explained. “You could see these companies and industries realizing that they needed to get aggressive about competing for talent.”

Today, three years since COVID-19 made landfall in North America, things still aren’t normal for employers, but Hanel thinks most organizations are starting to find their footing amidst the upheaval.

“The general pulse is that things are getting better,” Hanel said when asked what the consensus is among TAHRA’s membership.

Perhaps just as big a piece of the puzzle, though, was what Hanel described as “the fast food factor.” a feeling among employers that companies with lots of entry-level jobs – fast food restaurants, grocery stores, retail – were suddenly paying enough to draw candidates away from higher-level jobs in healthcare, manufacturing, and corporate business (to name a few).

Nationwide statistics confirm those assumptions about across-the-board wage growth: In 2021, the Average Wage Index (AWI) tracked a 8.89% increase – the biggest single-year AWI increase on record, per United States Social Security Administration data.

The organization spans employers of all sizes and from all manner of different industries, from local employers like Hagerty and Munson Healthcare to small manufacturers. While Hanel noted that the staffing situation remains harder for certain types of employers than others, he says he is hopeful.

“At the end of 2021, people were really

“Suddenly, people felt like they weren’t only competing with companies in their own industries, but also with the fast food industry,” Hanel said. “And I’ll use the fast food industry just as an example, but there are some other industries that drove this trend as well.”

In essence, Hanel explained, there was

Wage growth is one of many reasons that the post-pandemic moment has been viewed as a historic job seeker’s market for workers. But the same period has had employers fretting about finding enough people to fill jobs and keep operations up and running – let alone pursue growth strategies or new initiatives.

That short-staffing trend has been extremely visible in Traverse City, whether in the form of restaurants trimming their hours because of staffing shortages, or in Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) making unprecedented cuts to its busing schedules due to bus driver shortfalls.

While these issues aren’t going away – the TCAPS Board of Education just discussed the district’s need for at least 15 more bus drivers at their January meeting – Hanel does feel that some sense of balance is returning to the employment ecosystem. Crucially, he said, more employers are realizing that they can compete for talent with more than just salary hikes.

“I think the mentality of competing with the fast food industry has waned,” Hanel said. “We’re seeing companies starting to realize that they’re offering things that the fast food industry doesn’t, and that if you can articulate those things in your job descriptions and in your culture, you will start to have an easier time recruiting.”

Hanel especially feels that local employers have been learning the lesson of just how powerful a good job description can be in a job seeker’s market. The ruptured economy of the late 2000s and early 2010s taught many employers an “if you build it, they will come” mentality around job listings – as in, any job posting would draw candidates simply because a lot of people were out there looking for any job. Hiring managers, Hanel said, are in the process of unlearning those lessons.

“If you are not leveraging your job descriptions as a marketing arm, you’re not competing for the best talent, period,” Hanel said.

Hanel says he tries to give little nuggets in the job description that would represent TentCraft’s culture – whether that’s in the description of the role, or a description of the company, or in the benefits section.

“For example, are you doing things like paid parental leave? If so, that needs to be in your job description,” he said.

Hanel says he recently talked to a local company on a hiring spree without key information in the job description.

“They have a six-week paid maternity program – and a paid paternity program – yet they don’t mention it in their job description,” he said. “If you’re not including those types of details, you’re missing out on applicants.”

Jennifer Flick, vice president of human resources for Britten, said the company has seen a slew of hiring success stories lately because it is doing exactly what Hanel says: thinking about talent attraction as a form of marketing.

“We’ve taken this approach where we’re not just reactionary,” Flick explained.

Avoiding tactics like posting jobs and hoping, Flick says that Britten has taken a brand recognition recruiting approach, using social outlets like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook to share content around “work at Britten” themes.

“We want to be the employer that’s always in front of you,” she said. “We want to be the employer that’s at the front of your mind, so that when you’re having a bad day and you decide to job search, you’re like, ‘Man, I remember seeing that ad from Britten; I should check them out.’”

Across the board, Flick said that Britten has adopted a more strategic approach to recruitment – from establishing a company-wide minimum wage that’s higher than the state and federal standard, to leaning on partnerships with the Northwest Education Services Career-Tech Center or the Traverse Connect Northern Navigators program.

One successful strategy, Flick noted, has been an attempt to be clearer about key aspects of Britten’s company culture in job descriptions.

“We’re pretty nimble,” she said, referring to Britten’s reputation for taking on rush projects and pursuing aggressive project deadlines for major nationwide clients.

As a result, the business is often looking for a specific type of hustle in its hires – for instance, the ability to work 10-plus hours of overtimes some weeks when a project demands.

“That doesn’t mean you’re always going to be working 10 hours of overtime, but you’ve got to be able to have a little bit of flexibility to work within our culture,” she said.

Communicating those expectations up front, Flick said, has helped Britten improve the overall quality of its applicant pool. The result of those tweaks means that “the cloud is definitely not as dark and gloomy” for Britten’s hiring situation as it was earlier in the Great Resignation era.

While many employers are seeing signs of life in the staffing world, though, Hanel stressed that plenty of others are still struggling.

“I think healthcare is struggling the most,” he said. “And manufacturing was struggling for a long time, but in general is getting better – slowly.”

The common denominator for businesses that are still having trouble attracting candidates? Inability to fully embrace the new normal of remote work.

“Any industry that can offer 100% remote work, they’re coasting a little bit easier than the rest of us,” Hanel said.

The collaboration required to manufac- ture products is too important to offer many remote roles, and the remote work jobs are usually in things like direct sales.

“At TentCraft, we do not have any 100% remote employees,” he said. “Those corporate-only type organizations – like Hagerty –they’re able to lean on remote a little more, and that makes hiring easier.”

Still, even employers with operational models that demand in-person work have seen their fortunes improve in the past year or so.

One example is the Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA), which has been short employees in most position categories – including bus drivers, dispatchers, mechanics, and IT services – since before the pandemic.

While Director of Communications and Development Eric Lingaur acknowledged that staffing remains “BATA’s number one challenge impacting its ability to maintain and grow transportation options for customers,” he also noted that the organization has rolled out numerous aggressive recruiting and retention tactics over the past few years that are showing results.

Those strategies include decreasing wait times between applicants applying and being interviewed, paid CDL training for bus driver applicants, greater reliance on third-party recruiting companies and agen- cies, and most of all, a $10,000 recruitment/ retention bonus that pays out over time in exchange for a three-year commitment to the organization.

Lingaur said that those tactics and others have increased BATA’s hiring rate “from a trend of 2.25 new employees per month to five new employers per month,” boosted the employee retention rate from 61% to 80%, and reduced its count of vacant full-time bus driver positions from 26 to 14.

Beyond the fact that many job seekers simply want remote or hybrid work arrangements, Hanel pointed out the fact that remote also helps employers get around the two biggest obstacles that local recruiters are facing right now: housing and child care.

Despite much conversation around those issues locally, Hanel said “there are no improvements there” for employers, and that “if anything, it’s worse than it was before the pandemic.”

“In 2022, we had multiple job offers at TentCraft that were initially accepted and then rescinded based on either child care or housing conflicts,” Hanel explained.

Now, TentCraft is “hyper-focused” on local candidates like never before.

“If we can find a candidate locally – even if they’re a little less qualified, or if they don’t have the experience but they fit the culture – we are going to be more open to training and developing somebody who lives here already, because then we’re not fighting tooth and nail to get them relocated to the area,” he said.

Housing is the top barrier for another local manufacturer, too: Great Lakes Stainless, which specializes in making stainless steel cabinets, decorative metalwork, and more.

According to Great Lakes Stainless President Michael DeBruyn, that particular hurdle has gotten much higher in the wake of the pandemic because of housing pressure sparked by the pandemic migration.

“Indeed, we lost three employees over 18 months, each of which had a change in their housing situation, were unable to find affordable housing, and left the area,” he said.

Great Lakes Stainless also lost two potential employees, who were recent graduates of the top ranked welding school Industrial Arts Institute, because of housing difficulties.

Like other employers, though, Great Lake Stainless has adapted by implementing many of the competitive strategies that Hanel mentioned – particularly a more strategic approach to marketing the work and the culture of the business by highlighting interesting projects like airline ticket counters and high-end hotel lobbies.

“We work hard to highlight ... the variety and opportunities to gain new skills and work with new materials and processes,” he said. “And since the beginning of 2022, we have been able to add 10 new employees through hiring – and we are certainly looking to continue that effort in 2023.”

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