Is the tightening job market forcing you to pay workers higher wages?

SCHAUER: Absolutely. That's easy. In our industry, it's very difficult to find new employees.

BRAMAN: Yes, and it's a challenge because all of our costs are going up.

MEYERHOFER: Yes, especially for nurses, pharmacists, lab techs, imaging techs and other hard-to-fill positions.

NELSON: We try to keep our wages competitive with everyone else, so they do go up. We do professional salary surveys for the state of Washington and the Northwest. For our union workers, we are bound by the contract.

What's your greatest challenge in hiring new employees?

SCHAUER: Finding them. We advertise everywhere, we go through all the normal routes to recruit, but it's just difficult because there aren't enough people out there. Everybody is working in our industry. Even though the economy is slow in a number of sectors, in ours it is strong.

BRAMAN: We need people who have been in the industry for a number of years. Its hard to find people with those qualifications.

NELSON: Every position that we advertise for, we get hundreds of applications. We don't have a shortage of qualified people.

We have about 340 employees, and about 100 union workers. We try to keep our wages competitive, but if someone else is paying more we can only pay what a contract calls for.

MEYERHOFER: The supply of qualified people is limited, but we also want to be selective. We want people we hire to have technical skills, but we also want to make sure they'll be a good fit. The ability to get along is really important.

How are you holding down wage and benefit costs?

SCHAUER: It is very difficult. In our industry, it's not easy to pay more and provide more benefits because our clients don't want to absorb the extra costs. There's only so much you can do before you are no longer marketable because of the influence on costs. At the same time, we want to be competitive to job seekers, who can find much higher wages in other parts of the country.

Management-level engineers can easily make twice as much in L.A. as they make here. They look at the number we can offer and they discount it. They're not interested. If they did the research they might find that they are ahead here.

BRAMAN: We try to be more efficient, focus on fuel mileage to keep our costs down. We haven't purchased brand new equipment for a while. We pass those savings on to our drivers, because drivers go where the pay is best.

NELSON: We try to control the number of employees we have, and we've been very successful. We have the lowest employee-to-customer ratio of any utility in the state. Because of this, we have lower operations and maintenance budgets, but we are still able to pay competitive wages.

Within the benefits packages, our premiums were skyrocketing so we went to a self-insured (health care) program.

We actually pay the medical bills of our employees ourselves, and we have stoploss insurance to cover us if there is a very large bill. We have been able to beat what we think we'd be paying if we were still with a traditional insurer.

MEYERHOFER: People who work in health care actually have higher benefit costs. Maybe they're more aware of what's out there or they're more likely to take advantage of it. We're getting more creative in getting control of our benefit costs. We have creative incentives to get employees to be healthy. For example, we pay part of the costs at the YMCA or for parks and recreation activities.

How have your hiring and retention practices changed?

SCHAUER: We are using the Internet a good deal more. We are also recruiting at colleges, but that only gets us the new people with no experience. You can only absorb so many of these folks into your organization. We've done much better at attracting those people, but we still have much difficulty attracting the seasoned engineer.

BRAMAN: We do everything we can think of to keep people. We have increased wages and benefits. We try to tailor their work with the company to fit with their personal lives, so they can be at home every night or travel to areas they're interested in. We try to make the drivers as happy as we can and still get the job done.

NELSON: We tried to raise wages when we were having a hard time keeping qualified dispatchers. There was a wage disparity between PacifiCorp and our union rates. We tried to negotiate for higher wages for dispatchers, but the union voted it down. Since that time, PacifiCorp got its dispatch group filled and we were able to hire people.

MEYERHOFER: As the job market has tightened up, employers have become more and more focused on the value of employees. If you have happy employees, you have lower turnover, which impacts the entire business. We try to provide an environment that people want to work in so they don't go somewhere else. The benefits package is part of that.

Cheri Meyerhofer
Vice President of Human Resources at SW Washington Medical Center
"If you have happy employees, you
have lower turnover, which impacts the
entire business. We try to provide an
environment that people want to work in
so they don't go somewhere else."

Al Schauer
President of MacKay & Sposito Inc.
"We advertise everywhere, we go
through all the normal routes to recruit,
but it's just difficult because there aren't
enough people out there. Everybody is
working."

Dave Braman
Operations Manager at Mitchel Bros. Trucking
"We try to be more efficient, focus on
fuel mileage to keep our costs down. We
haven't purchased brand new equipment
for a while. We pass those savings on to
our drivers, because drivers go where the
pay is best."

Wayne Nelson
General Manager of Clark Public Utilities
"Our premiums were skyrocketing, so
we went to a self-insured program. We
actually pay the medical bills of our
employees ourselves."