Page 8 - BusinessWest September 15, 2021
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in his voice to add an exclamation point. “She was hustling, and I mean hustling. They had one woman on the tables, they had one person bus- ing, and they had a bartender — I don’t know how many they had in the kitchen. The food was com- ing out, and she was hustling.”
While that situation represents an extreme,
it encapsulates what many employers are fac- ing these days — an inability to staff up in the manner they want and need, often in ways that impact service, the customer experience, and, in many cases, the bottom line.
In Western Mass. and many other regions, print shops have been working overtime filling orders for ‘Help Wanted,’ ‘We’re Hiring,’ and ‘Join Our Team’ signs. Meanwhile, other signs get far more specific, listing benefits as well as as wage scales and sign-on bonuses. Meanwhile, most restaurants in the region have cut back days of operation and closed portions of their establish- ments, school systems struggle to hire bus drivers, and healthcare providers tussle with one another to find nurses and other professionals.
And the fight certainly doesn’t end when the person is hired, said Nancy Creed, executive director the Springfield Regional Chamber, add- ing that loyalty among employees is a thing of the past, and retention is every bit as challenging as hiring.
“It’s such a competitive market, and it’s so hard to find talent that ... you may hire some great tal- ent, and two weeks later another company scoops them from you,” she noted. “And there is no employee loyalty.”
The questions on the minds of everyone in business and economic development concern just when, and to what extent, the pendulum will
swing back in the direction of an employers’ labor market.
And the answer is a universal ‘I don’t know ... we’ll have to wait and see,’ or words to that effect.
While the massive virtual job fair didn’t pro- vide any hard answers to what’s ahead, neither did the most recent jobs report, which was a headscratcher to most analysts; only 235,000 jobs were added in August, the lowest number since January, following expectations for three times that number.
Getting back
to the job fair,
it was large in
every respect, said
Gadaire, who broke
down the numbers.
The event drew
more than 1,700
employers from
across the state and
across all sectors of
the economy, and
17,264 job seekers.
Over the course of week, 21,046 résumés were exchanged, and there were nearly 1.4 million vir- tual visits to the companies’ booths.
While those totals are all impressive, they will not ultimately define how successful this event was, he went on, because the numbers that really count concern the number of jobs to be added in the weeks and months to come.
“We felt we at least got some mass when
it comes to what we were trying to do,” said Gadaire. “What we’re doing now is doing all the follow-up to find out how much of that turned into job offers and hires; we’re getting that infor-
mation back from the companies now as we speak, and it looks like a pretty successful event.” Time will tell, obviously, and there are a num-
ber of factors that will ultimately determine how much of a dent will be put in the state’s labor crisis.
Indeed, those we spoke with said the federal unemployment benefits were certainly a contrib- utor to the deepening of the labor shortage that’s been witnessed over the past year and especially
“It’s such a competitive market, and it’s so hard to find talent that ... you may hire some great talent, and two weeks later another company scoops them from you. And there is no employee loyalty.”
      NANCY CREED
the past nine months. But it appears it’s not as big a factor as many thought, and in the meantime, there are many other factors.
Childcare, or a lack thereof, is a huge issue, said Creed, noting that many working parents — or parents who were working, especially single mothers — cannot return to the workplace with- out childcare, which is suffering from its own workforce crisis and other issues. Fear of COVID is another factor, she added, noting that the recent surge in
cases spawned by
the Delta variant
 Jobs
Continued on page 70
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