Upcoming EmployerOne Survey results might need an asterisk when compared against other years, the head of the Sarnia Lambton Workforce Development Board says.
“This is such an interesting time to be asking employers about who it is they’re trying to recruit because I don’t think they’ve ever had as many problems – as much difficulty – as they’ve had this year,” executive director Laura Greaves said.
Many areas, including Sarnia-Lambton, have had unusually low unemployment rates, particularly during this summer.
The local rate has since crept up from a low of 4.3 per cent in June to 5.8 per cent in September, development board statistics show.
“But still I hear from employers all of the time that they’re really struggling to hire,” Greaves said.
Questions in the 10th annual survey, which 49 employers had filled out so far as of Thursday, focus on topics like which jobs are a struggle for employers to fill, future hiring plans and what hiring they did the previous year.
The survey period closed on Jan. 31 and reports from the development board are made public in March.
For every year except 2022, the top method employers used to publicize job openings was word of mouth, Greaves said.
Online job boards took top spot in 2022 while social media stayed at number three, she added.
Word-of-mouth’s prominence means a lot of the data captured through the survey, which started with roughly 50 responses in its first year and grew to 300 in 2022, wouldn’t otherwise be known because it can’t be collected from public job posts, she said.
The EmployerOne Survey “really is our best source of local workforce data.”
A similar board in London first piloted the survey idea. Sarnia-Lambton’s and other workforce development boards then ran their own the following year after London’s proved fruitful, she said.
Plans in 2023 are to also compare the upcoming survey’s results to all of the surveys from the last decade to identify trends, Greaves said.
The previous two years are also outliers because of the impact of COVID-19, the executive director noted.
Generally, there’s survey participation from businesses big and small from the various employment sectors in the community.
Retail and health care tend to have a larger survey presence but are also major sectors in Sarnia-Lambton. Of the estimated 10,000 businesses across Lambton County, there are far more small companies, Greaves said.
“We have more small businesses we could always connect with,” she said, adding hopes are to also encourage more agricultural operations to take part.
For 2023’s survey, the overall aim is 326 responses, Greaves said, which is still a small sample size.
“We’re very happy with 300, but it’s not representative of all the businesses. That is absolutely the case,” she said.
That said, “there’s no better source of local data than this.”
Questions this year will also ask about hiring newcomers and international talent, she added.
“One of the things that we’re interested in knowing is our local employers hiring our Lambton College graduates,” which include many international students, she said.
Questions probe whether those hires are full or part time and what the community might be able to do to assist increasing the amount of hiring that does happen.
“We know how important this data is for local high schools, obviously for Lambton College, for any job seekers out there to know what are the skills that are required. What are the jobs that are going to be available?” she said.
The survey can be found at surveymonkey.com/r/BLSGM5B.