Newport Beach holds job fair amid pandemic-induced labor shortages

Businesses across Newport Beach are now hiring.

But, they, along with other businesses nationwide, are struggling to hire and retain staff as California emerges from a pandemic that caused the loss of nearly 2.7 million jobs statewide.

That’s why Newport Beach and Co., the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce, Newport Beach Restaurant Assn. and the city itself are organizing its first job fair for Thursday.

“It seems as if just about every business that I’m talking to — not just in the hospitality industry, but across multiple businesses — they’re just having trouble getting good quality applicants, or for that matter, any applicants for a lot of jobs,” said Gary Sherwin, president of Newport Beach and Co. in an interview Friday.

Sherwin said he got the idea to hold a job fair on a recent trip to Las Vegas. He said he’d been there to see how the city, as a tourist destination, was emerging from the pandemic.

As he passed the Tropicana, he saw that the billboard that usually boasted of the hotel’s headlining acts was instead promoting its signing bonus.

“It’s just pervasive that people can’t get the kind of quality talent that they need and, in many cases, they say they’re literally hiring anyone that breathes,” he continued. “That isn’t who they want to hire, but that’s sometimes all they can get.”

“We thought, ‘Well, this is a good opportunity for business organizations in the city to come together’ and came up with this job fair and that’s kind of how it all came to be,” Sherwin said.

The idea was then introduced to the city, the chamber and the Newport Beach Restaurant Assn., which all jumped on board to organize what is now the first Newport Beach Job Fair.

About 25 businesses will be gathering at the Newport Beach Civic Center Thursday to look for prospective employees with some prepared to begin the interview and hiring process then and there.

Raima Leight, the human resources manager for City Experiences by Hornblower’s Southern California region, said that hiring is a “mixed bag.”

Not all open positions are untouched, but it’s been a struggle to hire for frontline positions like servers, bartenders and cooks.

“Everybody wants to go out on the water and celebrate events that they’ve put off for a year, the demand is extremely high,” Leight said. “We had to kind of start from scratch with our staff.”

Leight said that between the reopenings and closures, some employees needed to move on and make the best decisions for themselves, which included leaving the hospitality sector all together because of its instability through last year.

The company participated in other recruiting events before, adding that Leight felt it was a good opportunity to network with other companies in the hospitality industry to share best practices.

“You have to be competitive,” Leight said, adding that they planned on holding on-site interviews and possibly offering contingent offers of employment on the spot.

“If I see a local business offering a $1,000 signing bonus, then maybe we want to think about something like that. It really is a competitive market to get employees right now.”

Juan Viramontes, the general manager of the Crab Cooker location in Newport Beach, said that he’s hired and rehired about 50 people in the last month but that he’s struggled with finding people to operate the back of the restaurant.

The location in Newport Beach hasn’t officially reopened yet, but employees are currently training at the Tustin Crab Cooker.

“We do get a lot of interest, but what I’m seeing now that I’ve never seen before,” Viramontes said. “We get a lot of interest, but then they completely drop off. I’m talking about we get the paperwork, the interview, they come on board and just don’t show up to their first day. I’ve seen people work a week and say, ‘This isn’t quite for me.’

“But I’ve never [before] seen people not even come in on their first day. It’s a little bit troubling, but it’s the new environment.”

Viramontes said the restaurant plans on being aggressive in its recruitment and knew that the Crab Cooker had to stand out from the other restaurants as an employer. He said he hoped to hire at least 20 more people to be comfortable for the July reopening.

The job fair is still accepting more exhibitors up until the day before, but Sherwin said that they are nearing capacity.

Interested businesses can visit visitnewportbeach.com/nbjobfair to register. He said the event is free for both employers and prospective employees and that organizers specifically planned to avoid making the process overly complicated.

“There’s nothing glitzy about this, but it’s really just a chance to to connect the dots between workers and employers,” Sherwin said.

“We wanted an easy way to ... give these companies access to talent that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach.”

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