Ben Sio, chief of staff of CenterState CEO, says it's a good time to be in the job market. The total number of openings in the region is upwards of 5,000.
"It’s at a variety of skill levels,” Sio said. “At one point, many people thought hey we just need more servers to come back to restaurants, but if you really dig into it we need RNs, we need engineers, we need software developers, and we need those servers, and people to work manufacturing lines."
Sio said it's presenting a major challenge for businesses that are experiencing high demand but are unable to expand fast enough to meet it. Like companies elsewhere in the country, local employers are trying to lure talent in with new offers including scholarship offerings and better healthcare coverage.
"We are seeing even more companies raising wages, paying sign-on bonuses - ones that weren’t willing to do so before the pandemic have started thinking about these kinds of things because the need is so dramatic,” Sio said.
But Sio said of all these new incentives, the one that is most likely to become a permanent offering is the remote work option.
“Many companies before [the pandemic] would never consider allowing employees for the majority of their workweek to be at home,” He said. “They thought they would be distracted, they thought they would not be productive, so just that shift in general with so many companies having a hybrid policy - that alone is very innovative and obviously was directly caused by the pandemic, but I don't think it’s going away.”
