CEO Roundtable: Workforce Development

Each month, we gather around the table with a different group of Springfield business leaders to discuss industry trends, workforce and company operations. Join us as we get a behind-the-scenes look into our business community from the C-suite.

An excerpt from the start of the podcast follows.

Christine Temple: Let’s start and talk about the temperature of employee recruitment and retention within your companies.
Diane Rozier: Active, selective and evolving. The unemployment rate is low. We don’t have a lot of openings right now, but we’re coming out of a period where the candidate pool was so small that we really have focused on our strategic planning around recruiting specifically, recognizing that the next three to five years, people are really going to be one of the greatest challenges for our organization. So, really developing the strategy behind that and making sure that we are onboarding the right people that will be with us long term.
Ryan Sivill: I immediately thought hot. We spend a lot of time in talent recruitment and development. Our profession is unique in that the vast majority of our hires are directly out of college. In a world where the number of high school graduates is declining and therefore the number of college graduates is declining, in a world where we’re in a profession that nationwide is still is trying to increase its numbers, and then you look out in the workforce and there’s a whole generation of accountants in the private sector retiring, which creates even more in supply and demand. We are deeply invested in recruiting and retention and frankly trying to grow the pipeline because that will be our No. 1 inhibitor to growth over the next decade, just finding enough talented people to train to do the work.
Marybeth Kleinsasser: We’re in the same boat. White hot. In our organization, we’re 24/7. Our mission is to support individuals with disabilities to be active members of the community. It really does take people working 365, 24/7. Recruitment and especially retention has been a strategic initiative for several years. But it’s not just hiring anybody, it’s really having people who have the heart and the drive who are committed to our core values.
Sivill: You hit it on finding the right people. There are certain skill sets that we need, but it’s also, what skill sets can we develop? What people are coming back to a second career that we have an opportunity (with)? It’s really a fine line between really investing in people but then also identifying those right ones that you really want to put the time into.
Rozier: You made the comment specifically about the values, and it really is a discussion on culture. That’s the heart of the retention; that’s the heart of the recruiting.
Kleinsasser: If you don’t have candidates that are committed to the organization’s mission and culture, then it’s not going to be a good fit for anybody.
Temple: You guys are all at really dynamic companies. Manufacturing is such a growing industry and a huge part of our state economy. Forvis Mazars, now. Don’t change again next year, please.
Sivill: We’re good.
Temple: You guys are part of a global network now, a top 10 accounting firm. And Arc of the Ozarks is just growing leaps and bounds, adding more services. You talked about culture, but what are those strategies to really find the right people?
Rozier: We have to break a stigma. There’s the stigma that it is hot and dirty and not a place for a long-term career. I grew up with a mom that’s like, “You can’t do anything without a college degree.” I would still argue the college degree is really important, but we have started so much earlier and trying to get more people in to just see what we do so that they can see it’s a clean space and we have air conditioning and that there is opportunity. We hire engineers. We’re a highly engineered organization. We’re actually working with kids as early as sixth and seventh grade so that we can influence the parents. A lot of the strategy comes down to partnerships, whether that’s with the educational institutions, various referral sources and really tapping into, again, aligning ourselves with organizations that mirror our values and beliefs as an organization.
Sivill: Same but different. You talked about the stigma. It’s a different stigma with accounting, right? But it is a stigma that our entire profession’s trying to overcome. We have started going into freshman-, sophomore-level college classes for students who know they want to be business majors and talking to them about what our profession really is, that it’s not green visors, green ledger paper and pencil chained to a desk. It’s technology. It’s a lot of interacting with people. It’s a real people business. It’s solving problems. We are investing a lot of time tactically in trying to break that stigma. We haven’t gone to sixth- or seventh-graders yet, but statewide and nationwide, our profession is going into high schools. The other thing that I would say tactically we’re doing is when you talk about getting the right people, it is just about building relationships early on. It’s getting in front of whether it’s an experienced hire or a campus recruit and starting to build a relationship. I will give this next generation of graduates credit; they care about wanting to know who they’re going to work with and the type of organization that they’re joining.
Kleinsasser: There’s always a misperception regardless of what type of organization you are that you’re trying to overcome. For us as the Arc has grown, we’ve been known traditionally as providing support to folks in their home environment. But now, it’s so much more than that. We’re hiring occupational therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses. You really have to cast a wide net and then adapt your strategy depending on who it is you’re trying to recruit. We get out with high schools, do mock interviews. Local colleges, professional associations, trade associations, things like that. Relationships have got to be the No. 1 thing. Over the last couple years, and especially over the last say 10 years with recruiting, you’ve really had to adapt as an organization. It used to be you just post something on Career Builder and they’ll come. But now, that definitely does not work. You have to utilize everything in your toolbox, not just your go-tos, Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, but starting at all of those professional networks, you really have to pound the pavement, so to speak.