Madison County’s unemployment rate is 2.3 percent. Alabama’s unemployment rate is 3.6 percent.

When we hear there is a labor shortage and a lot of people without jobs, those numbers don’t leave a lot of people on the unemployment rolls.

A percentage of the 2.5 percent don’t meet the needs of employers for some reason or another and quite realistically, it is the beauty of living and working in North Alabama right now.

With the efforts of the cities of Huntsville and Madison, the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce, the Madison Chamber of Commerce, Redstone Arsenal, and Huntsville’s vibrant, problem-solving small businesses, this area is holding its own on the hiring and retention of workers, attracting industry, and bringing people into the community.

According to Lucia Cape, senior vice president of Economic Development at the Chamber, workforce is a priority to meet the needs of the new and expanding businesses.

“While demand has fluctuated and required skills have changed over the years, the Chamber has provided recruitment services and coordination among workforce development partners to make sure employers have the talent they need,” said Cape.

In 2019 stakeholders in Madison, Morgan and Limestone counties commissioned a labor study by Deloitte that looked forward through interviews with nearly 100 employers across all industries about their hiring plans for the coming years.

“The projection was 25,000 new direct or induced jobs by the end of 2022,” said Cape. “While COVID negatively impacted some sectors and slowed growth in others, financial experts at Moody’s predict that Huntsville metro employment will return to pre-COVID levels by the end of 2021.

“That will restart the clock for recruiting those 25,000 new workers, plus other talent to support ongoing growth.”

Also, the Chamber offers sponsorship opportunities to enhance corporate recruitment, and some industries are working to build their own pipeline such as Homebuilders boot camp, Hatch for the hospitality industry, and SPUR for gig jobs at local restaurants.

Furthermore, the Chamber partnered with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Hiring Our Heroes recently in a nationwide hiring effort to connect the military community with businesses as they transition out of the military and into civilian life.

Huntsville is projecting an estimated 25,000 more jobs in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, construction, logistics, and technology over the next 18 months.

“Workforce attraction and retention have been key components of the Chamber’s programming for 15 years,” said Cape who was previously vice president for workforce. “We work to anticipate the requirements of our employers through studies, data analysis and focus groups, and we plan ahead for growth through career awareness for students and continuous marketing of Huntsville/Madison County as a smart place to live, work and play.”

According to Michael Chalmers, owner of Spherion Staffing in Huntsville, what we are seeing are growing pangs. While the workforce may be limited, it just may be the answer in North Alabama is to bring the workforce in.

“I believe we are seeing wage compression,” said Chalmers. “For example, if I am a business that pays $16 to $17 an hour and it has been tight to find people that meet the job qualifications, traditionally I have dug deeper down into the candidate pool to those $11 to $12 an hour candidates, and I’m bringing them up to that $17 rate.

“If I can get a good quality person with good work ethic, good skills, and is able to communicate well as a team player – that is they have the soft skills needed – I’ll teach them the hard skills.”

Chalmers said it continues on down the wage scale.

“Now those workers once hired at $11 to $12 an hour aren’t there anymore so now companies have to dig deeper down to get people working for $8 an hour and paying them a little more per hour,” he said.

“So, business owners who have traditionally paid between minimum wage at $7.25 to $10 an hour who are saying no one wants to come work for me, it’s because they’re all going to work at businesses now paying $12 to $17 an hour because of the workplace shortage.”

Ashley Gibson, business development manager at Job Impulse, said there is unquestionably a pervasive labor shortage across many industries that includes entry level production positions, the hospitality industry, all the way up to engineers and system analysts.

She said we are in a people’s market now more than ever before, meaning people know there are more jobs than people, so they can be pickier about their choices; but companies more than ever before are promoting the fact you don’t need any experience to do the jobs, and they will train you.

“Most companies have always provided training, but it has never been advertised,” said Gibson. “As we experience the labor shortage, they are making sure you understand that just because you have always been a housekeeper or manufacturing production worker, does not mean you have to go back into that industry.

“People are realizing they have more options than they did initially, and they can move from a $10 an hour housekeeping or a food service job into a production job that starts at $17 hour.

“So, it Is not a change in how things have always been so much as everything has been magnified – options that have always been there are more obvious and noticeable.”

Terramé Day Spa and Salon put job training at the center of their business and always has.

“We position ourselves as a high-end experience business, so we want to deliver a high-end service,” said Mike Johnson. He and his wife Charla own three Terramé locations in Huntsville and Madison. “We prefer our hair stylists come to us without any training so we can train them ourselves. Our training involves an apprenticeship as well and takes about a year, but it is so worth it because that is kind of our sandbox. And employees benefit from it too because now they can compete against anybody.”

Charla Johnson said the business looks at employees for the long-term.

“We’re looking at three-, five-, 10-year plans for everybody that works here,” she said. “It’s different from the salon industry overall because all of ours are W2 employees.”

Gibson said there are also downsides to the workforce crisis and candidates having so much say-so in the hiring process.

“No-call, no-shows are at an all-time high across the board, and the amount of people we talk to compared to what we get coming in to the office is astronomical,” she said. “Out of 30 people scheduled to come in for an interview, only 12 to 14 show up, and only four or five of them will go to work.”

She believes there are a number of reasons for it, but fear is still one of them.

“People are still afraid to go back to work, concerned about exposure to the virus and vaccines have not eased that,” Gibson said. “They are not just afraid of getting the virus themselves, but they are afraid of being exposed to the virus and then coming home and giving it to a grandparent or a child.”

“Their attitude is such that we know what I am doing to prevent exposure to the virus, but what are others around you are doing to stay safe.”

Her business clients in the meantime, are in a panic because they have contracts with their customers, and they have to deliver after missing a year’s worth of production already.

“Even in our industry there is pressure because my job is to get people to work at a time when people don’t have to, or don’t want to,” said Gibson.

Spherion commissions an Emerging Workforce Study to tracking the socioeconomic trends shaping the U.S. workforce over the past 22 years. the study paints a distinctive, multi-dimensional portrait of the workforce as seen through the eyes of employees and employers.

“Surveying 250,000 people, the Emerging Workforce Study says that while it may seem like people don’t care about the dollar rate they are paid every day, the surveys always show the dollar is one of the most important things to a worker and I think it will continue to be,” said Chalmers.

The truth is, he said, people today, do not view work in the same perspective our dads did 30 and 40 years ago.

“My father started working at a company and as long as that company paid him a fair wage, gave his family benefits, and provided him with a retirement plan, he would stay at that company for the rest of his life,” Chalmers said.

“But the younger workforce is not that motivated to stay. They don’t say, ‘I’m going to work for this company because I want security I want to stay there forever.’ They want to add the value they know they can bring to your company but when they don’t feel they are adding that value, they are going to move on when a better opportunity arises.”

He said a company has to say, how important are the benefits like vacation if they are only going to be there for two to three years and then move on to the next thing?

While there is no doubt about labor shortages, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center just onboarded 220 employees with more than 100 waiting for orientation. At first, it looked easy but Chris Maynard, manager of Talent Acquisition, said it was anything but easy.

“We were able to bring back our recruiter, Niki Kelly, who pulled 200 rabbits out of a hat,” said Maynard. “Normally we start hiring for summer during the previous summer. Due to the pandemic, we wanted to catch up by starting last fall, but we couldn’t because we weren’t sure whether we would have a summer this year either.

“Thanks to the generosity of so many people committed to the Space Camp campaign, we were able to keep going and we began hiring in earnest in January.”

Maynard said as a 501(c)(3) organization, the Space Center laid off 90 percent of their employees during the early days of the COVID pandemic, so they started by bringing back as many former employees as they could.

“Nearly 40 percent of those former employees returned and 36 transferred internally,” he said.

Chalmers and Gibson are looking on the bright side.

“At this point we are in a candidate short market, but that also puts us in a candidate-driven market,” said Chalmers.

“As businesses in general, I have to make sure we are adjusting our operations and our culture and acknowledging what drives the desires of people to join our organizations,” he said. “And we have to drive those to really meet the needs of those individuals.

“For instance, if a client says, ‘We have two 12-hour shifts that run seven days a week and this is what we have to have because that’s the way it has always been done’, then I say back to them, ‘Let’s look at something different.’”