Page 15 - BusinessWest October 3, 2022

All those things go a long way to retain people and attract new talent.”
Amy Roberts, executive vice president and chief Human Resources officer at PeoplesBank, says both the company and its employees have a story to tell, and creating the right cultural fit is key to building a stable workforce.
“We’re trying to be up front with individu- als about our core values and who we are and that we’re looking for people who are interested
individual. We spend time in the process talking about that.”
For this issue’s focus on employment, Busi- nessWest spoke to five area employers — Big Y, PeoplesBank, the Center for Human Develop- ment (CHD), Bulkley Richardson, and Health New England (HNE) — to get a feel for how challenging the much-talked-about workforce crunch has been for their organizations, and how they’ve shifted their hiring and retention
not to do this work anymore. So we lost ground in 2021, but we’re gaining ground again. I feel optimistic; it feels less frenetic than it did last year, and it feels like things are improving. We’ve gained about 100 employees over 2021.”
Many of the current challenges are geo- graphic, especially in rural settings, where CHD has dozens of locations. “It’s a lot of geography to cover, and there are fewer people in more rural places, so we’re having a harder time find- ing folks to do the work.”
Betsey Quick, executive director at Bulkley Richardson, had one of the most positive stories to tell about her law firm’s workforce situation, but, like at CHD, 2021 saw some turmoil.
“That was an unduly interesting time for us, as COVID made people retire faster,” she told BusinessWest. “People who had worked here
10, 20, even 40 and 50 years re-evaluated their work-life balance and said, ‘I don’t need to work until I’m 70. I want to spend money and travel; life is short.’ So we had a slew of retirements we wouldn’t have had, and that punched up our needs quite a bit.”
When the firm started ramping up hiring last year, “all the news in every sector was stat- ing how employees were being poached and salaries were way up; it was an employees’ mar- ket. I was fully prepared to have a difficult time because we needed attorneys, we needed staff, we needed management,” she went on. “And for maybe the first three months, I saw the tight- ness in the market. We weren’t getting respons- es. We considered going out to recruiters, which we never had to do here. But after about three months, résumés started flooding in.”
“I think it’s important not to oversell yourself and make the position or company something they’re not; if you do, ultimately a person is not going to stick around.”
AMY ROBERTS
in being a part of that,” she explained. “So the process is focused around asking the candidate to tell us stories, tell us things about themselves. We believe that’s really critical.”
After all, it’s not just about bringing in talent, but creating a team for the long run.
“I think it’s important not to oversell yourself and make the position or company something they’re not; if you do, ultimately a person is not going to stick around,” Roberts said. “We try to be up front about who we are as an organiza- tion, what’s important to us, how we view suc- cess here, and hope that’s best match for the
strategies to deal with it.
Carol Fitzgerald, vice president of Human
Resources at CHD, admitted that 2021 was dif- ficult, but “I feel like 2022 has gotten better, though there are still some challenges. In 2021, we were losing a lot of folks; it was not only hard to get folks, but our folks were making the choice to leave the field.
“As a large, human-service, behavioral-health organization, we are essential workers, and
we work face to face with folks anywhere from birth to elders,” she explained. “And I think a lot of people were deciding during the pandemic
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EMPLOYMENT
OCTOBER 3, 2022 15