Help wanted - everywhere: Flathead Valley labor shortage reaches critical mass

Increased wages, hiring bonuses and the offer of flexible hours and better benefits for some jobs are signs of the times as the Flathead Valley grapples with a labor shortage created largely by a robust local economy.

At the Flathead Job Service on Friday, there were 1,089 job openings posted for positions that run the gamut of every employment sector.

“Things are back to the way they were about 10 years ago,” said Patrick Barkey, director of the University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research. “The dominant factor is the economy.”

Trevor Gonser, employment services supervisor at the Flathead Job Service, agreed that employers are feeling deja vu from the last job boom that peaked around 2006 before a national recession jump-started a severe local economic downturn that lasted several years.

“This goes back to pre-recession times,” Gonser said about the high number of job vacancies. “Business are hiring across the board; it’s not just the hospitality industry. What we’re finding is that more people are gainfully employed with year-round jobs. The seasonal availability is decreasing.”

Gonser said he saw the impact firsthand when he ate at a downtown Whitefish restaurant last week and couldn’t order a pizza on the menu because the restaurant didn’t have enough staffers to prepare it.

In Kalispell, Taco Bell has closed its dining room and offers only drive-through service because it can’t find workers.

Glacier Restaurant Group, which owns and operates a number of Whitefish restaurants, is offering $500 hiring bonuses to fill its many openings.

Nomad Global Communications Solutions of Columbia Falls, a company that builds mobile command centers and specialty vehicles for businesses and government agencies with remote communication requirements, has been searching relentlessly for an experienced auto-body paint technician and just can’t find one, Nomad Human Resource Manager Ronda Wakefield said.

“We have grown tremendously in the past few months,” Wakefield said.

When she started with Nomad three years ago, it had 50 employees. Now the company employs 100 people.

Wakefield said Nomad gets great welding and electrical work job candidates because Flathead Valley Community College offers curriculum in those areas. It’s other skilled positions that take a lot more work to fill.

“We searched for months for a machinist and didn’t find one, so eventually we trained someone internally,” Wakefield said. “We prefer to promote from within, but when we need higher-level jobs filled, the company broadens its search through the Job Service, paid advertising and social media.”

Nomad offers $100 referral bonuses to its employees. “We’re scratching the barrel anywhere we can,” Wakefield said, adding that the company raised its starting wage to $13 an hour.

The company has had interest from returning Bakken oilfield workers and Weyerhaeuser workers who just lost their jobs when two mills closed in Columbia Falls.

Their wage expectations and skill sets, however, typically don’t match up, Wakefield said.

“I was getting four to five applicants a week from the Bakken [workers], but at $13 an hour [for entry-level positions] versus the $30 an hour they were making, it’s not an option,” she said.

Riverside Garage Doors of Kalispell has posted a Job Service listing for a garage door installer five times since January, offering $15 an hour at first and gradually raising the starting pay to $22 per hour by the end of July. The job is still posted at a range of $18 to $25 per hour.

Employers are “trying a combo of different things” to hire workers, Gonser said. They’re working on retaining existing employees by offering more flexible schedules and raising starting pay to compete with the array of companies seeking workers.

“TeleTech has raised its wages, with a 20 percent increase in starting pay,” Gonser said.

Barkey talked about wage growth in the Flathead during a recent economic outlook seminar in Kalispell.

“I was looking at the total wage bill, which is probably over $1 billion in the Flathead. That is growing as jobs grow,” Barkey said. “It’s growing faster than jobs. That indicates that with wages the general trend is starting to see a pickup.”

Job growth has been particularly strong in three employment sectors — health care, construction and tourism-related businesses, Barkey said.

While the health-care industry didn’t experience the recession per se, most health-care businesses across the state took an uncharacteristic pause after the federal Affordable Healthcare Act took effect.

“A lot of curve balls were thrown” at health-care businesses, Barkey said.

The recession prompted many people to forgo or postpone elective surgery, and bad debt was a bigger factor. Health-care businesses also began outsourcing some of the regulatory compliance paperwork, Barkey said, and there was “a lot of mandated spending on electronic health records,” which prompted many independent providers to close their practices and join bigger hospital staffs.

Kalispell Regional Healthcare has more than 250 job openings for nurses, certified nurse assistants and many other clinical and non-clinical positions, said Mellody Sharpton, director of communications and marketing.

“Nurses with specializations in certain disciplines and clinical lab scientists are especially difficult to recruit, simply because of supply and demand,” Sharpton said.

Starting Sept. 1, Kalispell Regional is launching a new employee referral program to reward staffers with $300 cash bonuses for referrals that yield new employees. There are specific criteria, Sharpton said. The job candidate must make a reference to the referring employee on his/her application and the employee must complete an employee referral form prior to the candidate applying.

OPENING around 500 new hotel rooms in the Flathead this summer has tapped the maintenance worker pool especially hard, Gonser said.

At the Historic Tamarack Lodge near Coram, the owners had to stop offering breakfast to guests because of a worker shortage.

“We’ve always tried to employ local people,” Tamarack co-owner Teresa Woehler said.

Keeping a full staff is perhaps the most challenging part of operating the lodge and accompanying cabins, she said. Tamarack reluctantly has hired some foreign students for its summer staff, which balloons to about 20 workers, but Woehler said she and her husband, Doug, prefer to hire local residents. They’re considering building employee housing onsite to bolster their chances of retaining employees.

Whitefish Mountain Resort has tapped foreign student exchange for workers for several years. The resort will hire 20 students from abroad for the winter ski season, resort spokeswoman Riley Polumbus said.

“They are housed in town; that way they get to experience town as well and get the full experience, which is the reason why they participate in the exchange,” Polumbus said.

Whitefish Mountain Resort is actually ahead of last year with applications from new job-seekers, Polumbus said.

“This is the time of year when we ask our returning staff to let us know if they are coming back, so we are still waiting to hear from some,” she said. “We do have a high return rate. In fact, some departments typically have zero turnover.”

Local school districts aren’t immune from the labor shortage, either.

The Whitefish School District was able to hire teachers for all 15 openings, but sometimes has difficulty filling other positions.

“We don’t typically have a lot of trouble filling teacher positions,” Whitefish Schools Director of Business Danelle Reisch said. “But with food-service and custodial positions, we don’t have tons of applications.”

Kalispell Public Schools still has 23 job openings posted as another school year begins this week. Positions range from a school psychologist to bus drivers.

The Kalispell district hired 45 new teachers and other classroom staffers such as para-educators.

“We’re really lucky in that Kalispell is a destination district” for hiring teachers, Kalispell Public Schools Director of Human Resources Tracy Scott said. “We don’t have a hard time recruiting for certified positions, but we struggle with noncertified positions — custodians, bus drivers, food service, para-educators.”

A job fair held Thursday for Kalispell Public Schools attacted less than 20 potential applicants for noncertified jobs. Last year the same fair drew about 150 prospective employees, Scott said.

According to the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, about 6 percent of the state’s workforce is over 65, and about 97,000 workers are 55 to 64 years old. At least 130,000 Montana baby boomers are expected to retire within the next 10 years.

The number of retiring baby boomers is a factor in the labor shortage, but takes a back seat to the booming Flathead economy.

“Demographics move slowly, so the difference [made by retiring workers] between this year to next” isn’t that great, Barkey said.

“We have at least five generations in the labor force today if we peel back the onion,” he said. “There’s some truth to the baby boomer retirement factor, but a lot [of retirement age workers] are still working and a lot will continue working. The new threat in retirement is you’re going to outlive your assets.”

Still, losing top-level experienced workers does affect the workforce, especially at smaller companies.

“From a talent point of view, who’s going to replace this person?” Barkey said. “It’s a big challenge.”

The state Department of Labor Research and Analysis Bureau projects that Montana will add about 6,500 jobs per year over the next decade. However, the state is only expected to add 716 people ages 16 to 64 each year to the workforce, leaving a dramatic shortfall in the amount of workers needed to fill those projected 6,500 jobs per year.

Under these circumstances, though, the state’s working population — ages 16 to 64 — won’t grow quickly enough to match growing employment demand.

A state report published in June 2015 pointed out that labor force participation rates for youths ages 16 to 19 have been declining since the 1970s because more young people have opted for further education.

“A more educated workforce ultimately helps the labor market,” state economist Christopher Bradley said in the report. “However, the 2007 recession resulted in a sharp decline in youth labor force participation that has not recovered along with the rest of the economy.

“The only age group with increasing labor force participation rates are older workers over 55 years, who have been participating at higher rates since about 1993 due to improved health,” Bradley said. 

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.