Innovating HR: AI, Flexibility, and Attracting Top Talent

Episode Summary:

In this episode of "Chamber Amplified," Doug Jenkins from the Findlay-Hancock County Chamber of Commerce is joined by Kristina Van Buskirk of the Findlay Area Human Resource Association to look into the dynamics of the local labor force and the broader economic implications impacting businesses in the Findlay region. 

Kristina shares her insights into the challenges faced by local employers: an aging population, a decline in birth rates, and a widening gap between available skill sets and job market requirements. She emphasizes the pressing need for education reform to realign with market demands, urging schools to collaborate more closely with local industries. The conversation also ventures into innovative recruiting tactics, highlighting AI tools like geo-mapping and refining resumes for AI screening, which are revolutionizing hiring processes. 

Key Takeaways:

• Labor shortages are exacerbated by demographic shifts and a mismatch between job skills and market needs.
• The narrative around post-secondary education is shifting to value skilled trades over traditional college pathways.
• AI tools are transforming recruitment strategies by enabling targeted advertising and efficient resume screening.
• Companies are exploring flexible work schedules to tap into non-traditional workforce segments.
• Local employers need to adapt and innovate to remain competitive in attracting talent.

Resources:

• August 5, 2025 Fresh Brewed Business: https://members.findlayhancockchamber.com/chambercalendar/Details/fresh-brewed-business-1172390?sourceTypeId=Website

Music and sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com

Transcript

0:00:02 - (Doug Jenkins): Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Doug Jenkins from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. On each episode of Chamber Amplified, we're examining issues impacting the local business community. From employee recruitment and retention, marketing, IT issues. It's really anything that can be impacting local businesses. Our goal is to give the local business community tips each week on at least one way they can improve operations and thrive in the current business environment.
0:00:26 - (Doug Jenkins): We're going to talk about the labor force today. That's another area of concern that we saw in recent surveys, both in our own internal surveying and something from the Federal Reserve, which we'll talk about a little bit later. That's a big, big concern for area businesses and businesses throughout the region. Not a real big surprise given how everything has really gone since 2020. But we want to dive into that a little bit more today.
0:00:49 - (Doug Jenkins): Christina Van Buskirk of the Findlay Area Human Resources association and Werkbrow is going to join us. We'll talk about the local labor pool. Is it expanding or shrinking might be a little bit more complicated than what you think there. What issues are local employers facing with that labor pool and what obstacles do people have when it comes to joining the labor force? It's all a delicate balance. It all plays together in a pretty intricate way. We're going to break that all down for you here in the next 20.
0:01:15 - (B): Or minutes or so.
0:01:16 - (Doug Jenkins): You'll have all the answers by the end of it, I promise. Or, you know, maybe a few answers and more questions which we can delve into in future episodes. Thanks again for tuning in. Remember, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify Spotify, you can rate.
0:01:28 - (B): And review the show.
0:01:28 - (Doug Jenkins): It really does help spread the word. Now let's get into it. Joined on the podcast now by Christina.
0:01:34 - (B): Van Buskirk of the Findlay Area Human Resources association as we talk about just what labor looks like here in 2025, more than halfway through 2025, I guess, at this point. Christina, thanks for joining us.
0:01:47 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Yeah, thanks for having me, Doug.
0:01:48 - (B): This is, it's an interesting topic because we've done some surveying internally with our members and then the the Fed went and did a more regional survey and both of them kind of come back to the same thing. One of the biggest concerns that area businesses have is the labor pool and whether there's enough employees, whether employees are skilled enough in the right things, that type of thing. So we'll jump into all of that today.
0:02:13 - (B): But Christina, just from a mile high view of what when you Discuss things with the Findlay Area Human Resources association, with other HR professionals in the area. What are the concerns that they're talking about right now?
0:02:26 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Well, I think it's. I think the thing that we need to look at is what is causing this shortage. You know, and there's some general information that is going to reflect these numbers. Some of those are the aging population, for example, declining birth rates. My generation, the Gen Xers, we did not reproduce like the baby boomers. Most of us only had like one or two children compared to the baby boomers, who would have four or five.
0:02:55 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Mismatch between workers and skill sets, for example, is another huge one that is coming into play. You see a lot of kids that are going to school, and for so long it's been pushed in high schools and stuff that you've got to have that college education. You've got to have. Have that college education. And actually it's the jobs out there are more in just skilled trades that are needing to be filled.
0:03:20 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): So we have kids that are spending lots of money to go to college and get an education for a job. That currently is not what we need in our job market. Skill sets that we're lacking in are electricians, you know, basic math skills. How to read a tape measure, for example, is huge in a lot of industries. And it's just not. They're not getting that in the schools. And the kids don't see the importance in learning the basic math.
0:03:49 - (B): I don't even want to get into how I read a tape measure. It's. It's absurd. It works. Most of my projects don't fall apart, so that's good. But. But that's. I mean, that's kind of a symptomatic of. These are things. We used to do wood shop in school, and you would learn those things. We don't do those as much. And I don't want to beat up on the schools because they're. Their budgets being stretched thin as.
0:04:12 - (B): And we're also very fortunate to have Millstream here for training. But it looks like even after years of conversation on this, that it's just.
0:04:22 - (Doug Jenkins): Still not maybe getting to the parents.
0:04:24 - (B): And the kids that, hey, there are some very good careers available that aren't the college route. Is that kind of the experience you're seeing?
0:04:32 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Yeah, exactly. And I want to challenge, you know, your educators and your school guidance counselors to make an effort to go out to the community and ask the manufacturers what type of jobs they have. I welcome any school officials that want to come in and view our facility. So they have an idea what, what's out there for the kids. A lot of them that I've had through have been through and like, well, I had no idea that this even looks like this.
0:05:01 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): And then when you tell them that, you know, a lot of manufacturing facilities, the jobs are making 60 to 70,000 a year right out of the get go, you know, where you. Unfortunately, a lot of your college jobs don't make that right out of the get go.
0:05:19 - (B): I know, I certainly didn't.
0:05:21 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Yeah.
0:05:22 - (B): And we should mention that along with being part of Farah there, you're also worried most of your work there is at work brow. So that would be definitely a place that schools can get in touch with.
0:05:33 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Yes.
0:05:34 - (B): One of the other things that we didn't mention that we have to help try and tie schools and area industry together is raise the bar. And we've had Trisha Vesque and, and Ashley on the program here as well to talk about it. So I guess in that regard, like there are a lot of people pushing that way in Findlay and Hancock county, but it's really hard to get the momentum kind of equalized after decades and decades of college, college, college talk.
0:06:03 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Right, Exactly. And that's the biggest thing that we're struggling with is getting that narrative out there rather than the college, college, college talk. You know, current unemployment rates, you're looking at roughly around 4.7%. This is up in our area from what it was last year. Again, the biggest places that we're looking that we need jobs filled is in manufacturing, healthcare, retail and food service in the area.
0:06:34 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): And then you've also got to bring in the transportation. Findlay is a huge market for transportation and logistics in the area and they need those CDL drivers.
0:06:44 - (B): When, when you discuss these different things at the monthly meetings that you have, we've laid out some of the resources that, that are available, but are there any internal. Has anybody kind of stumb to anything creative internally that they're doing that might be showing results?
0:07:03 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): I think the biggest thing that I have noticed that we in the HR field are embracing and trying to get more involved with is AI. AI is a great recruiting tool. It can be used as such as geo mapping. And what geo mapping is, say you have a job opening in your area or in your company, you can put what they call a geo mapping fence around, say Millstream, for example, so that when the kids would go into Millstream, they would pull up their Facebook or their social media and our ad would pop up for a job opening, for example.
0:07:45 - (B): That's a really good idea.
0:07:46 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Kind of creepy in a way.
0:07:48 - (B): Yeah.
0:07:49 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): It shows you just how much they're. We're tracking you. But yes, that's coming onto the market. A lot of companies are starting to do that. The other things that you're going to see is a lot of companies are taking advantage of using the tools on in AI for in indeed and help screening through the process. So a good candidate if they want to better themselves. Check out. There's tons and tons of stuff on just Google it on how to write your resume so that it gets through AI and it and it's a lot of how to set up a resume properly putting keywords into your resume so that it will trigger the AI to push that resume out rather than get stopped by the initial questions or stuff like that.
0:08:36 - (Doug Jenkins): Yeah.
0:08:37 - (B): There's certainly a technique to doing that that there's no shortage of YouTube videos and everything to kind of train you up on on how to do that. So it's worth looking up. I want to talk a little bit about the labor pool just in general. As you mentioned, you talked about some of the reasons why there just aren't employees, the retirees, people retiring out of the workforce. They're not being anyone there to replace them. Have you seen businesses reaching back out to that retired population to bring them back in? I know we've had some discussions here on the podcast with, with some people who have done that and also there's I think a lot of people who've maybe retired early have decided maybe I actually want to work a few days a week here and there. I don't need quite all this free time.
0:09:21 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Yeah. And I have known people to do reach out to the retirees and see if they want to come back and work a part time or work, you know, here and there to fill in. I've also heard of companies that are looking at really hitting a source of workers that I never would have thought about and that's the stay at home moms that want to work a schedule where they can drop their kids off at school and then be home by by the time the kids get out of school.
0:09:49 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): So I've seen workforces or manufacturing adjust their schedule to pull from that market.
0:09:55 - (B): We so we mentioned just the shift of like changing the narrative from always talking college, college, college to kids changing manufacturing to be a little bit more flexible with scheduling like that I have to imagine is a massive undertaking and probably takes a little while to get turned around. How have local manufacturers and employers dealt with this and do you see them being more amenable to doing that now.
0:10:21 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): It is. It can be difficult to deal with. And I'm going to be the first one to say it's not for every manufacturer.
0:10:28 - (B): Right.
0:10:30 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): It's definitely a niche manufacturing that can do that or off that or offer that much of a type of a flexible schedule. I know within my organization personally, we even went from a five day work week down to a four day work week because we were trying to give people more time with their families. So it's all in the perspective of how you look at it and how you want to treat it. And you've got to really just start to think outside of the box and not rule everything totally out and off the table before you ever even try it.
0:11:06 - (B): I think that's a really good point. It's just we've hit the point with this that trying to. You go back and say, well, this is how we used to do it. In some cases the way that we used to do it is probably the way we should still do it. But in a lot of cases the way we used to do it may just end up being the way we used to do it. Now we have to figure out how we do it now amongst, amongst HR employees. Are you seeing more of that mindset?
0:11:33 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Yeah, I think we have to have that mindset because we're all competing for the same. From the same workforce, you know. Yeah. So we're all trying to pull from the same labor market. So we have. You have to offer different things for different employees in order to get them to come work for you. You want to be that employer that is offering the better package, the better benefits, the better wages and stuff like that.
0:11:58 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Because everybody's hiring right now. So just because everybody's hiring, I mean, it means you could have somebody one day and then they're going to go to your neighbor next door the next day.
0:12:09 - (B): Yeah, let's talk about that for a little bit. We knew, especially coming out of the, the pandemic and everything in 20, 21, 2010, 22 especially, there was a lot of that job hopping that that was happening as people were raising their, their rates and changing their benefit packages and everything has that slowed down. I guess anecdotally the people I've talked to, it feels like it's slowed down, but it sounds like maybe it's still an issue.
0:12:35 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): I think it's still, I still think we're trying to recover from the pandemic. We had a lot of mass exodus during the pandemic where people left the job market or looked for the remote work, found the remote work, and did not return to the job market. So I think we're still trying to recoup that and recover from that. Do I think there's still job hopping going on? I think there's always going to be job hopping going on.
0:13:00 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): I read an article that, you know, the average tenure with a company is not what it used to be when, you know, when I was coming into the job market. I've worked with work bra for 25 years and now they're saying that if you get 18 months out of someone that's really good.
0:13:19 - (B): That's quite the shift.
0:13:21 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Yes, that's a huge shift.
0:13:22 - (B): I'm trying to think the longest I've worked anywhere, I think it was at the radio stations before here, but before that, I think it was working for my parents at their ice cream place where I grew up. Like eight years of dipping ice cream for people there. That might have been an indentured servitude thing. I don't know. We're not going to get into it. This isn't a labor relations podcast. So when it comes back to the labor pool, the soft skills is another thing that we've talked about.
0:13:50 - (B): Have we made progress in people just coming into the workforce, in you're doing the handshake, knowing that they got to show up, knowing that they've got to be on time. Is. Are we seeing any headway there? Because I know that's been something that's been talked about for years and I don't want to make it out. You know, this, this generation doesn't want to work because you can find articles going back to the turn of the, the 20th century that say that younger people don't want to work, but the soft skills was really a concern. Is any headway being made there?
0:14:22 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): I think there is headway being made there, but it's still lacking. You have your high schoolers and junior high kids that will sit in the same room with their best friend and text them as they're sitting on the couch rather than hold on a verbal conversation with them. So it's very hard to overcome that. I often, when I have high schoolers come in and tour our facility, one of the things I talk about is soft skills. And the other thing I talk about is when you're job hunting, have your voicemail set up on your phone, you would be surprised how many people miss opportunities because one, their voicemail isn't even set up or they don't even know how to retrieve messages from it.
0:15:07 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): You know, those are little things that, you know, make a big difference when it comes to employers because we're not going to keep continually reaching out if we can't get an answer right.
0:15:16 - (B): I didn't even think about that. And now, now that you mentioned it, I'm positive that one of my sons doesn't have their voicemail set up. So that'll be a conversation we have later today. That's. It's crazy, the things that you have to think about that. We've talked about this on the podcast a lot. There being just so many different generations in the workforce right now, too. I think what you're just talking about kind of alludes to it. Where Gen Z works different than millennials, millennials work different than Gen X, and Gen X works different than the boomers, and they're all in the workforce at the same time.
0:15:52 - (B): As an HR professional, what's that like to juggle?
0:15:55 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): It's interesting because I never thought in my career that I would be reaching out to candidates via text message. And for the younger generation, sometimes that's the best way to get a hold of them is a text message. You know, for the boomers, you're. You're talking a phone call. So being in an HR field, you need to know what. Who you're going after and what you're looking for, you know, as far as who you're recruiting and how to reach out to them.
0:16:25 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): That's where the AI and all the tools that you can get on some of these job sites, you know, like, indeed ZipRecruiter, make it a lot easier for HR to do that with.
0:16:36 - (B): We've talked a little bit about making.
0:16:39 - (Doug Jenkins): Sure that we have a strong labor.
0:16:40 - (B): Pool, and we've talked a little bit about why the labor pool has shrunk so much over the last decade, maybe decade and a half. As far as efforts to expand the labor pool, what do you see being talked about? I mean, obviously we talk about the need for housing, we talk about the need for childcare needed for transportation.
0:16:57 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): The.
0:16:57 - (B): Those things pop up a lot in conversations that I know we have in the HR world. Do those pop up as big barriers?
0:17:05 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Absolutely. The housing one is huge. Trying to bring. We have a lot of jobs in the Findlay area, and we keep bringing more and more jobs into the Findlay area. But it's very hard to recruit and bring people in when we don't have housing available for them. I often, anytime I'm bringing somebody in from outside of the Findlay area, I tell Them. You know, don't always start your house hunt in Findlay. Search the area communities. You know, sometimes you have a better, better opportunity to get something out in say, Arlington or Mount Blanchard or Fostoria, where you're just driving to work.
0:17:43 - (B): You are preaching to the choir on that one. And that's not in any means a knock to, to Findlay. I just think it's a way that smaller communities like in Arlington, like in Arcadia, like a Macomb, can really start to grow again. And not just grow, but start to have the amenities that the, that the residents are going to want there. As if you're able to attract the people to, to build houses there or to buy houses there.
0:18:09 - (B): As long as you have reliable transportation. I think that is a big, big opportunity for smaller villages. And as someone who grew up in a small village myself, that means a lot to me. So that's, I think that's a really, really interesting outlook on it and I'm just happy to hear someone else say it. Actually. Christina, if people want to get involved in the Findlay Area Human Resources association and maybe be part of some of these conversations and everything, what's the best way to go about doing that?
0:18:37 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): Okay, so we have a monthly meeting the second Wednesday of every month. They're held at the Hilton Garden Inn. Our next meeting is scheduled for August 13th and that is our big legal half day seminar. We bring in area attorneys to talk about legal issues that HR is currently facing. And that is going to start at 11:30 in the morning and that will run until 3:30 in the afternoon. So that's a great opportunity.
0:19:06 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): If you just Google Findlay Area Human Resource association, it'll pop up with the information about our monthly meetings.
0:19:13 - (B): Very good. Christina, we appreciate your time on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
0:19:17 - (Kristina Van Buskirk): You're welcome.
0:19:19 - (Doug Jenkins): We're going to be digging even further into this topic at the August 5th fresh brewed business. That's a week from today as we release this episode. And we'll be getting an update on a survey that the Federal Reserve did on some of the biggest challenges and what they are for businesses in the region. I'll put a link to that event in our show notes. I really invite you to join us. Not only will you hear from the Federal Reserve, but we'll be hearing from local members as well on what they're seeing on a variety of different topics. So if you're interested in what workforce looks like and what issues businesses are facing in our region, it'll be a great event for you to check out again. That's Fresh Brewed business coming up on August 5th at the Marathon center for the Performing Arts.
0:19:59 - (Doug Jenkins): That'll do it. For this week's episode, Chamber Amplified has a free podcast for the community thanks to the investment of members in the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. Because of our robust membership, we're able to focus on providing timely information to the Findlay and Hancock county business community, run leadership programs for adults and teenagers, and be an advocate for the area. That's all while providing tools to help local businesses succeed.
0:20:22 - (Doug Jenkins): And if that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, just let me know. We can talk about how an investment in the Chamber not only strengthens your business, but the community as a whole. And if you have ideas for topics you'd like to hear covered on future episodes, just send me an email. Djenkinsinlahancockchamber.com thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on Chamber Amplified from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce.