Employers face challenges finding workers

Little Caesar’s needs experienced assistant managers.

Candidates don’t come easy, though, in a city where unemployment is low and demand for workers high.

So the pizza chain is advertising — on a window on its storefront along West 41st Street — with an offer to pay $12 an hour.

It seems like the best option at this point, Little Caesar’s assistant manager Mike Lammers says.

“For any kind of fast-food job, there’s a lot of turnover where you’re losing people,” he explained. “You have spurts where you lose a whole bunch of people and aren’t able to hire a lot of people. So yes, to get someone to stay a little longer, you have to offer a little more. We’re offering this.”

The job is among more than 2,000 open positions Sioux Falls employers are trying to fill these days, from fast food to finance and retail to health care.

When he’s promoting Sioux Falls as a good place to live and work, Mayor Mike Huether likes to cite a figure of 2,400 or 2,500 job openings. Certainly it’s a fluid number, changing daily. But it also likely falls far short of the actual total of available jobs.

The city recently unveiled a new website, SiouxFallsHasJobs.com, that listed 2,448 openings in Sioux Falls as of noon Friday. This past Tuesday, the state Department of Labor and Regulation showed Sioux Falls with 2,979.

Why the difference?

Greg Johnson, who runs the state Department of Labor’s office in Sioux Falls, said the numbers vary depending on where employers choose to advertise job openings. Some post to the labor department’s job site, but others use private websites, or both.

Heather Hitterdal, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said the SiouxFallsHasJobs.com relies on Indeed.com, a leading jobs aggregating site, for the jobs it lists.

“We know it’s not going to capture every single job that is open in Sioux Falls,” she said. “But it likely captures some jobs that other sites don’t capture because people can post things directly to Indeed. We’re doing the best we can to have the most comprehensive site there is right now.”

As of this week, the largest job needs on any of those sites appears to be in the health care field. Of the 2,979 jobs listed Tuesday with the Department of Labor for Sioux Falls, 614 were in health care and social assistance.

Next in line — administrative and support and waste management and remediation services at 498, then retail trade at 464. Accommodation and food service, finance and insurance, and construction have big needs, too.

“I think health care is the one that consistently comes up,” Darrin Smith, director of Community Development for the city, said. “For some time, that’s always been at the top as far as the most openings. And it’s across the board in all facets of health care.”

Health care tends to pay well. So why is there consistently so many openings?

A number of reasons, Smith said. The biggest factor is simply not enough workers with health care skills. And that would be true in other job needs areas, he said — the available workforce simply doesn’t have the skill set to do the work.

His office is using $500,000 provided by the City Council this year to help finance workforce development initiatives. Part of the efforts it is getting behind is recruiting workers with specific skills.

“We have a lot of people looking for work, but in many cases it means they need to be trained properly,” Smith said. “They need to be connected to the jobs that are available, and that’s part of what we’re working on.”

As Little Caesar’s can tell you, wages drive job openings as well. When businesses are complaining to him about being able to fill their job needs, Smith said he asks them, “What do you pay?”

“When they tell me, nine bucks, my response is, ‘Well, there’s your problem,’ ” he said.

Higher wages could solve some labor needs in this community, he said. The question becomes then, through recruitment and training and higher wages, how low do you go and still maintain a responsible unemployment rate?

Sioux Falls’ rate right now is 3.5 percent. Does it want 2 percent unemployment, or 1 percent?

The answers aren’t so easy, said Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University in Omaha. A city like Sioux Falls needs a certain level of unemployment, but not too much, he said.

For example, the cyclically unemployed are those out of work due to recession or economic slowdown. “The less you have of this,” Goss said, “the better.”

Similarly, the less Sioux Falls has of the structurally unemployed, the better it is. Those people are unemployed because their skills don’t match up with the job needs, he said.

What the community does want is a certain level of frictional unemployment, according to Goss. Those are openings created when a worker moves from one job to another, what the economists call “churn.” It’s good when workers move to jobs where their productivity can be higher, he said.

The downside of Sioux Falls’ low unemployment rate is what that says to businesses looking to locate here. They “will be less inclined to locate or move to your community if they perceive that it will be difficult to hire needed workers,” he said.

“In the former Soviet Union, it was not unusual to have unemployment rates of less than two percent,” Goss said. “It was certainly not a signal of a healthy labor market. It was a command economy with virtually no churn.”

Sioux Falls doesn’t have that problem. But there’s few in workforce development in this city who don’t understand that filling the job openings it does have is as challenging as it’s ever been.

Whether that’s 2,400 jobs or 3,000.

“It feels like we’ve been in that 2,500 to 2,600 available jobs range for what feels like a very, very long time,” Darrin Smith said. “We’ve got to do something. Believe me, we’re trying to do something.”