With the unemployment rate hovering at around 2.8 percent, Vermont employers are getting creative in their efforts to attract job candidates.
Perks like health club memberships and in-house yoga have become standard at workplaces in Vermont and elsewhere. In order to stand out, Liquid Measurement, a manufacturing company in the Franklin County town of Georgia, offers everybody in the company a $1,000 vacation stipend that’s available every year.
“It’s quite an art to attract people to Vermont from out of state,” said Martha Hanson, chief human resources officer at Liquid Measurement.
Employees have to have worked at the company for two years to qualify for the Liquid Measurement perk, which has been in place for about eight years.
“All you have to do is go on vacation, take $1,000, have a nice time, unwind … it’s really about restoring yourself,” Hanson said.
Employers all over the country are beefing up their benefits programs, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, which surveyed its members on the topic for its 2018 employee benefits report. More than one-third of SHRM’s 3,500 responders said they had increased their benefits offerings over the last 12 months.
National Life, an insurance company with 800 employees at its headquarters in Montpelier, last spring opened an onsite health clinic that is free to employees who use the company’s Cigna insurance, and $20 for employees insured elsewhere. The clinic, run by Cigna, is open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day and has a physician assistant and a nurse, said Ross Sneyd, director of corporate communications and community relations.
“It’s something we discussed doing for a number of years,” said Sneyd. “ It was a way to help employees stay healthier, and to alleviate some of the challenges of being able to go to the doctor in the middle of the workday. We promote wellness here, but if you can’t get to the doctor it’s pretty hard to be able to uphold those values.”
The Springfield-based Vermont Telephone Co. Inc., or VTEL, offers a $5,000 emergency fund for a “truly unusual emergency.” It’s available to anyone who works for VTEL, said President Michel Guité. It doesn’t have to be repaid.
“They discuss it only with one person in the finance office, so no one else knows it has been requested or paid,” he said. It has been used a half-dozen times, Guité said.
VTEL also offers tuition reimbursement for studies related to company work. There’s no maximum, said Guité.
“We sent someone entirely through graduate school, but each situation is unique,” he said.
Champlain Cable, a manufacturer in Colchester, offers tuition reimbursement even for workers pursuing a degree that has nothing to do with their jobs. CEO and President Bill Reichert earned his own MBA through the program in the mid-1990s.
The company is trying to promote the benefit more as it seeks to attract the chemists, physicists and engineers it needs. Champlain Cable employs 140 people in Vermont and 75 at two plants in Texas. Any employee, salaried or otherwise, is eligible. One employee used it to get a nursing certificate, and another to become a dental hygienist, Reichert said.
“It works for us, because even if I only get a number of years from an employee, it’s worth it to Champlain Cable so we can get people we may not normally have gotten,” he said.
The BioTek instrumentation company in Winooski offers 100 percent tuition reimbursement for one class per semester. The company also tries to accommodate telecommuting proposals, said Kathy Gendron, vice president of human resources.
“We have had a handful of employees who were planning to leave BioTek to move out of state, and we figured out a way to support them so that they could work remotely and keep their job here,” she said.
Vermont jobs tend to pay less than similar positions in other states. According to Census data, the average Vermont wage in 2017 was $46,186, compared to an average wage of $55,390 nationally. That plays a role.
Vermont salaries are “a huge challenge that I face every day when I’m trying to get people to move here,” said Jax Willey, the president of the Vermont search firm Orion Global Talent.
“Companies here are small and can’t really offer $20,000 more and so they have to be creative,” said Willey, who works out of her home in Coventry. “The companies that put that effort into their culture, they do become more desirable. Besides money, if people can get past the salary being lower, they want a culture that will invest in them.”
She added that a client in southern Vermont has a squash court.
“That’s huge,” she said. “That’s so progressive. Only Google has a squash court; companies in Vermont, they don’t.”
Reichert said he thinks company culture is more important for recruitment than salary.
“Getting people to Vermont is really not a matter of money,” he said. “We have to pay the wage we have to pay. It’s really a matter of what else do we offer that other folks don’t offer.”
But David Bradbury, the president of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, said in his experience, wages do matter.
“Corporate recruitment and identification of workers is all about the wage,” he said. “We have historic levels of student debt; folks can’t find a place to live that they can afford. From my lens, you have to offer a market wage or compensation structure.”
Visibility is even more valuable than pay or benefits, Bradbury said. It’s tough for small Vermont companies to stand out in a crowded and chaotic field of job listings.
“There is a lot of noise with these massive job sites,” he said. “It takes craft and real effort to get your own employees and your own customers to highlight your company.”
Many employers say the high cost of housing in Vermont deters people from moving to the state to take jobs. Southwestern Vermont Medical Center has used its foundation to fix up old houses that it sells to employees through a nonprofit called Healthy Homes for Bennington.
“There is an awful lot of literature out there that ties homeownership to healthier lifestyles, and then we also have challenges with recruiting and retaining our workforce; local housing options are challenging,” said Kevin Dailey, the hospital’s vice president of human resources.
Bradbury said the Middlebury students who go through VCET’s entrepreneurship course in January tend not to know that companies like Burton and dealer.com are based in Vermont. If they did, he said, they would be more likely to apply for internships there and then jobs.
“We have got to find a better way in Vermont to aggregate the demand for workforce and do a better job of accessing one, people who are already here, regardless of age, and two, the college students, and it’s just not being done well,” he said.
