A survey of just over 100 Chatham-Kent businesses has found a large majority – over 86 per cent – plan to hire new employees in 2022.
Audrey Ansell, the municipality’s Chatham-Kent Workforce Planning Board lead, said this finding from the Employer One Survey either indicates growth or indicates a need for employers to get their workforce back “up to speed.”
“I think it’s probably a mix of the two,” she said. “Certainly, with 86 per cent of employers hiring, there are jobs available in this community that employers want people hired for … to help them get back to normal business, or indeed grow.”
The survey was distributed in January and the results are meant to reflect the experiences of businesses during 2021. The planning board didn’t conduct the survey last year, so this is the first time the board has looked at these trends in the business community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The number of businesses that responded this year dropped by more than 200 since the 2020 survey. There were 101 responses this year, which was the lowest turnout since 2015.
Ansell said missing a year, the restrictions that were in place in January and businesses’ general experiences during the pandemic could have led to the lower numbers.
“People are trying to run their businesses and trying to figure out staffing and all the myriad of things that go along with business,” she said. “They probably had a lot of surveys” or forms to apply for funding “to complete throughout COVID.”
Although the previous surveys were before her time in this role, Ansell said the planning board also would have done more in-person outreach to businesses about this survey in the past.
“There was none of that this year,” she said. “We weren’t able to do that.”
She said the survey isn’t meant to capture every business in Chatham-Kent, but it can indicate what businesses are experiencing or how they should be planning.
With this survey, online job postings became the top way employers look for employees, replacing word of mouth from the first spot for the first time. Ansell said employers that use their company website may be able to attract workers who have been seeking more meaningful employment during the pandemic.
“Prospective employees can get a feel for what your company offers over and above the straight job description,” she said. “They’re looking to understand what a company represents and what their mission is, those kinds of things seem to be important.”
Ansell said the vast majority of employers were looking locally for workers last year, but they have shown some willingness to look across the province of the country.
Over 70 per cent of the employers surveyed also said they had hard-to-fill positions. Ansell said the planning board’s role to address this is to provide the information to groups in the community that help job seekers in terms of having the right skills or training.
Another finding from the survey is that the largest group of employees is in the 40-54 age range, meaning those employees will start moving into retirement age in 10 years.
Ansell said employers will need to think about how they will proceed with succession planning.
“Is that upscaling and training younger demographics in their workforce? Is it about hiring new in younger demographics in order to reduce that average age?” she said.
An encouraging point from the survey, Ansell said, is that 10 per cent of the responses were from startup businesses.
“That may indicate through the pandemic people have looked towards starting new businesses and opportunities there for them,” she said. “I’d like to see where that goes.”
The results from the Employer One Survey can be found at www.ckworkforcedev.com/Pages/Labour-Market.aspx.