Maintaining a workforce in a revolving-door industry
Posted On September 19, 2023
Panini Pete and Cheryl Blohme, the brother and sister team who run a collection of restaurants as the PP Hospitality Group, say that the restaurant industry is a bit like a pet dog. You love it and it loves you unconditionally, but occasionally it’s going to chew up your sneakers. You do what you can to minimize the chaos it creates – such as keeping your sneakers off the floor, but you understand that a certain bit is to be expected. “You shouldn’t freak out,” Pete says, “about a dog being a dog.” So it is with hiring and retaining… Read More
Categories: Blog, Recruiting, What's Working with Cam Marston, Workplace
Hiring the workforce of the future in today’s tight labor market
Posted On September 12, 2023
Hiring employees is difficult enough these days. If you’re looking to hire a workforce that’s forward-looking toward the future, you’re probably going to have to handle some of their training yourself. So says our guest in a recent episode of “What’s Working with Cam Marston.” Elizabeth Crofoot is a senior economist with Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm, and she sees three primary types of skills that employers are looking for as they prepare their workplaces for the challenges ahead. Digital skills – familiarity and expertise with new technologies and their applications. Transition -driven skills – soft skills and specific… Read More
Categories: Blog, Recruiting, What's Working with Cam Marston, Workplace
Recruiting and retention in today’s market means abandoning old ways of thinking
Posted On July 28, 2023
Businesses in pretty much every industry are having difficulty finding enough employees these days. It’s not uncommon for an employer to need to fill dozens of positions quickly – sometimes even more. Dr. Josh Duplantis’ job is to help fill those vacancies. Duplantis, our guest in the latest episode of “What’s Working with Cam Marston,” is the Dean of Workforce Development at Coastal Alabama Community College, and he says filling your workforce needs these days means abandoning old ways of thinking. First of all, the days of just advertising a job and sifting through resumes is over. “You’ve got to… Read More
Categories: Blog, Recruiting, What's Working with Cam Marston
Retaining Alabama: The effort to retain talent in a growing economy
Posted On November 27, 2022
Alabama’s colleges and universities attract a lot of students from out of state. Nearly 60 percent of the University of Alabama’s more than 38,000 students in 2021 came from other states or countries. At Auburn, out-of-state enrollment was just under half of its more than 31,000 students last year. More than three-quarters of those students leave Alabama when they graduate, however. What’s more, about a quarter of in-state students who go to college in Alabama also leave the state to start their careers. Overall, only about half the state’s college graduates are still working in Alabama five years after they… Read More
Categories: Blog, Podcast, Recruiting, What's Working with Cam Marston
On the road again with the Gen-Savvy Financial Advisor
Posted On July 28, 2022
When I was asked to propose a half-day program for financial advisors I was happy to dust off the contents of the Gen-Savvy Financial Advisor – update the data, refresh the slides, rehearse the content – and deliver the program at the annual LPL Focus event in Denver. The last time I did two half day programs on the topic with in 2019 with LPL in Boston. This time I added an hour of content on recruiting and retaining talent. These small-office advisors struggle with finding and retaining talent just like other businesses do. They need some understanding of the… Read More
Categories: Financial Services, Recruiting, What's Working with Cam Marston
What can a former CIA counterintelligence officer teach us about hiring?
Posted On July 18, 2022
When your job is to recruit informants for the CIA, you learn to ask the right questions. Blake Mobley did just that while working as a counterintelligence officer under two presidents. It was an experience that taught him how to look for the structural weaknesses in organizations, how to find what motivates people, and the sorts of questions one needs to ask to really learn what they need to know about a person. Those are valuable tools in the hiring process, too. And in the latest episode of “What’s Working with Cam Marston,” Mobley shares how some of the lessons… Read More
Categories: Blog, Podcast, Recruiting, What's Working with Cam Marston
The BP Method: Using reverse mentoring as a talent recruiting tool
Posted On July 5, 2019
A year ago, I spoke with Pershing Advisor Solutions CEO Mark Tibergien about reverse mentoring, where older business leaders enlist the help of younger employees to keep up to date on current trends and the issues important to millennials in the workplace. Now one of the largest energy companies in the world is utilizing the approach as well. According to a recent Bloomberg article, CEO of British Petroleum’s Upstream, 48-year-old Bernard Looney, is taking mentoring from 26-year-old BP petrophysicist Connor Tann. Looney’s goals are more than just making sure BP is meeting the needs of its millennial employees, however. He… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Recruiting, Training Industry, Workplace
Perks created to attract employees today could become standard tomorrow
Posted On July 11, 2018
Phil Smoker finds himself in a unique situation these days. The fifth generation to build Smoker Craft boats, Smoker has seen his company average about 20 percent growth since rebounding from the recession in 2010. He’s had to hire a lot of people to keep up with that growth. And now for the unique part: His company is located in Elkhart County, Indiana, where about half of all the RVs in the country are built. The unemployment level in Elkhart County is 2.4 percent – just under half the national rate. So Smoker, whose company builds several different brands of… Read More
Categories: Podcast, Recruiting, Workplace
How do you find good employees?
Posted On March 9, 2018
How do you find good employees? Too many employers report this as one of their top, most enduring problems. There simply aren’t enough qualified applicants to fill the positions that need filling. And even some of those applicants who are qualified may not be suited to the demands of the job or the industry. Enterprise Holdings, a $22 billion international company and one of the leading car rental firms in the world, somehow finds 9,000 new management trainees and 2,000 interns a year — and consistently turns them into a strong, customer-focused team. How do they do it? In this… Read More
Categories: Recruiting, Workplace
Belichick may not need SnapFace to field a team. But you do.
Posted On February 16, 2017
Bill Belichick is, most would agree, clearly the most successful person in his field – coaching professional football. He has led the New England Patriots to five Super Bowl victories, including two of the last three years. He is the benchmark by which other NFL coaches are now judged. But while his fashion sense is somewhere just this side of high school sophomore (the hoodies! The hoodies!), he claims to have no idea what Snapchat is – or even how to say it. “I’m not on SnapFace and all that,” Belichick said on a radio show recently when asked about… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Recruiting