Area Recruiters Battle to Fill Positions
The economy is white hot. Home values are soaring. More Ventura County residents are working than at any other time in history.
In other words, it looks like hard days ahead for Kerrin Turrow.
“It’s a tough time to be a recruiter,” said Turrow, the human resources director at Accelerated Networks in Moorpark. “I get more job openings on my desk day after day. We’re just constantly overwhelmed.”
Human resources directors--particularly in the high-tech arena--are probably the only people cursing the tight labor market during a period of prosperity that has swept up even the hard-core jobless in an employment wave. November’s 4.8% unemployment rate is the lowest in a generation--down from 6% in 1998--and would be even lower were it not for the county’s current surplus of seasonal farm labor.
So, employers are promoting themselves like never before, competing with one another and working to sell employees on Ventura County as the ideal spot to nail down their stakes.
And, in some cases, that even means cooperating with the people who would otherwise be their rivals, observers say.
Human resource directors say that one of their biggest challenges is luring employees to an area that hasn’t yet made a national name for itself. The county’s burgeoning 101 Corridor--a stretch of high-tech firms from Tarzana to Camarillo--lacks the national reputation of Silicon Valley or North Carolina’s research triangle.
“It seems to be the critical issue in the county,” said Rhonda LaRue, president of InfoVision Systems, an Ojai-based research firm. “We’re still a bit of a sleeper. We don’t have a high-profile identity, so the focus is on appealing to people and getting them here and growing and training from within.”
This is the reason why Amgen of Newbury Park promotes its “entrepreneurial spirit” and talks about its on-site shuttle buses. Ventura-based Kinko’s gives its workers everything from profit-sharing agreements to pizza parties for high sales.
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Xircom, a Newbury Park manufacturer of PC cards and other products, promises hefty bonuses and gives tours of its campus, which has a 1950s-style diner and “cabanas” with Malaysian rain-forest themes for workers to relax while spending 12 hours a day at work.
“You just drive around the parking lot and you’ll see [how our employees are doing],” said Kenneth Bauer, human resources director at Xircom. “There are new Fords and Chevys. We got a brand new Jag that just showed up the other day.”
But those kinds of promises breed a savvy employee, who often can play companies off one another--which only increases the competition between firms.
“You’ve got to get people to work with you to move from another employment situation,” said Paul Rostron, senior vice president of human resources at Kinko’s. “It’s a game of stealing.”
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Kinko’s now screens potential employees the minute they walk into a store to fill out an application, rather than waiting days for an interview. At Xircom, recruiters regularly make cold calls to their competitors and know the reverse is being done--often by companies that can offer something they can’t: the promise of an initial public offering.
“When any of us lose people, it’s to start-ups and dot-coms,” Bauer said. “If somebody offers you 100,000 shares of stock, how do you say no to that?”
The main hurdle is that companies have to look outside the county to find the employees they want--sometimes as far as Canada, the United Kingdom or India--and convince employees to make their way to a county they may never have heard of--or if they have, a place they may associate with the smoggy sprawl of Los Angeles.
“We say, ‘Here is Thousand Oaks as it is--not as you’ve heard of it,’ ” said Thomas Hutton, senior manager of staffing and operations at Amgen. “And the two biggest hurdles are housing costs and the perceived quality of [Southern California] schools. People really do have to weigh the benefits.”
Some businesspeople say the answer to that employment riddle is to work together to turn the county into a draw for scientists and tech-heads. That’s part of the thinking of the county’s informal cluster system, which works to promote various county industries.
“We’ve found we have to work with our competitors to sell the area as a whole,” said John Mungenast, who heads the high-tech cluster. “We can say, ‘I know you’re concerned that if the job doesn’t work out you’ll be stranded. Let me assure you that there are five similar firms within a one-hour radius.’ ”
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Although the program is still fairly young, most employers admit that what is good for one company can be good for another. The more people who come into the county, the more of an employment pool there will be--from spouses looking for work to those with an eye on a new job.
Observers believe the game of perks will continue, although the stakes may vary.
“In this industry, [educated people] are the chosen ones,” Accelerated Networks’ Turrow said. “They read a lot of [articles] that say you can have anything you want. You can sip cappuccino all day long and bring your dog to work. We just say, ‘That sounds great. If you have the opportunity, maybe you should take it.’ ”
But start-ups like Accelerated Networks have the means to play a different game, human resources officials said--stock options and the glory of putting the nose to the grindstone.
“The work is the work,” Turrow said. “You won’t have time to enjoy a meditation pool.”
* FAMILY TIES
A Westlake Village firm helps family-owned businesses prepare for a change in command. B6
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