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V O L . X X V I I N O. X X V I I D E C E M B E R 1 3 , 2 0 2 1 20 WO R K F O R C E D E V E L O P M E N T BUSINESSES ADJUST WAGES UP, With going going M inimum wages are going up, with $15 an hour becom- ing the norm. Businesses such as Maine Medical Center and Bangor Savings Bank have pushed their minimums even higher, to $17 and $18 an hour, respectively. Sign-on bonuses are common, with Portland paying $3,000 bonuses to attract school bus drivers. And still, hiring is the toughest it has been in decades. "Fifteen dollars an hour is the base- line. It's more like $17 to $18 is the mini- mum if you're not fast food," says Said Eastman, CEO of JobsIneUS, which operates JobsInME. "If you're paying someone less than $32,000 a year to work full-time, the likelihood of you attract- ing candidates is slim. A minimum living wage is closer to the $20 range." Scott LeClair, Hannaford' Super- markets' director of talent, says the hiring market is the most challenging he's seen in his 40 years with the grocer. "Competitors are pulling out all the stops, so we need to be on our game," LeClair says. Hannaford recently held a two-day hiring event across all of its stores with the goal of getting 1,000 new employees. It had immediate interviews available and talked to about 2,000 people. It ulti- mately hired 1,100 of them. e "days of hiring" event was so successful that Hannaford now plans to do that seasonally to beef up stores with big summer client bases, and to build hiring for the fall and winter holidays, LeClair says. Hannaford actually had to increase staffing during the pandemic as people ate at home more often rather than dining out. Hannaford now employs about 35,000 workers. Hannaford average hourly wage is "well above" $15 an hour, LeClair says. He declined to cite Hannaford's base starting salary. Companies are paying more for each hire, through bonuses, benefits and hourly wages, recruiters say. And companies need to get used to these higher wage levels. "Wage inflation is here to stay. One thing this pandemic has taught job seek- ers is that they are way more valuable than they had been led to believe. Companies are getting the message the hard way," Eastman says. For example, Eastman worked with a company that needed customer service workers, as well as shipping and receiving workers willing to do the "second shift" or night hours. e customer service job, which offered remote work from home options, got more views online and 100% more applicants than the shipping and receiving gig. "It's much harder to show up at a facil- ity at a certain time, work a physical shift at odd hours. If you need to fill that role, the premium isn't $1.75 an hour. It's got to be much, much more," Eastman says. Currently, it takes the average com- pany about 45 to 90 days to find the right employee, Eastman says. 'Keep recruiting' Bob Montgomery-Rice, Bangor Savings Bank's president and CEO, says recruit- ing needs to be constant. "You have to be very active in recruit- ing on a constant basis. Even when you have all your jobs filled, you keep recruit- ing," Montgomery-Rice says. It's not just about the money. Other factors such as flexible work hours, a family-first environment, proximity to home, tuition reimbursement and ben- efits are what workers are shopping for, recruiting executives say. For small businesses, it's difficult to compete on benefits, and matching higher wages can be challenging. e best way for a small business to recruit is to become enmeshed with the commu- nity and find people through word-of- mouth and referrals from local contacts, recruiters say. "You have to be looking all the time, well before you actually need some- one," says Holly Lancaster, director of recruiting for KMA Human Resources Consulting LLC. One-time bonuses have been suc- cessful for some employers, but that just reshuffles the labor force from one com- pany to another. It doesn't really improve the overall job market participation. Maine's labor market participation, which reflects those people who are employed or unemployed and actively looking for work, remained about 60% in October or 2 percentage points less than before the pandemic. e statewide unemployment rate for October was 4.9%, roughly about the same level it has been for nine months. "e trends started before the pan- demic for both clinical and non-clinical roles. e pandemic exacerbated the hir- ing challenge and we've had to double- down on our efforts," says omas Ter Horst, Maine Medical Center's vice president of human resources. For Maine Medical Center, the five most challenging areas to fill are registered nurses, certified nursing assistants, surgical technicians, imaging technicians and environmental service workers, Ter Horst says. "It's fair to say we're seeing less applications. But we're still doing a lot of hiring," says Ter Horst, who added P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y O F J O B S I N T H E U S P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y O F S C O T T L E C L A I R , H A N N A F O R D F O C U S For now, Maine's minimum wage is $12.15 an hour. For an employee working 40 hours a week, that translates to $486. For the year, that would be $25,272. Maine's living wage in 2019 was $31,043 according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. In 2022, the minimum wage will be $12.75. Here's a snapshot of Maine's hourly minimum wage over the years: Said Eastman, CEO of JobsInTheUS Scott LeClair, director of talent for Hannaford If you're paying someone less than $32,000 a year to work full-time, the likelihood of you attracting candidates is slim. — Said Eastman JobsInME S O U R C E S : minimum-wage.org; livingwage.mit.edu MAINE'S MINIMUM WAGE GROWTH VS. LIVING WAGE 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 $2 $0 $4 $6 $8 $18 $12 $14 $16 $10 $7.25 $7.25 $7.25 $7.25 $7.25 $7.25 $7.50 $9.00 $10.00 $10.00 $10.00 $12.15 $12.75 2019 living wage for 1 2019 living wage for 1 adult with no children: adult with no children: $14.92 $14.92 The hurdle gets higher for hiring and retaining workers B y J e s s i c a H a l l

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