Employment is high but slowing.
“One million foreign-born workers have left the labor market since January,” economist Arjun Chakravarti (pictured), managing partner at Cogknition, Chicago, said June 18 at CSP’s C-Store Foodservice Forum in Schaumburg, Illinois.
The job market is still balanced but new jobs have been steadily declining for 12 months, he said. Small business hiring is key, Chakravarti said, with 77% of U.S. job openings coming from companies with less than 250 employees.
“You’re gonna be in a world right now where you’re getting a slowing economy adding to the labor pool—you have a leak in the balloon, if you will, because you’re losing a very, very large number of foreign workers at a pretty fast pace," Chakravarti said.
He asked attendees what they are doing about this from a recruitment perspective, and if anyone was working on talent pools, or a database of potential employees.
"What are you doing in terms of ease of application or background checks right now?” Chakravarti asked. “Have you made it easier for people to come in and be checked, be onboarded, be able to take shifts on a regular basis?"
For those targeting teenagers, he said, schedules must be flexible.
Once an employee is hired, the challenge becomes retaining them.
“Any person you lose is becoming so much more costly because a lot of operators are telling us that they’re losing too many," Chakravarti said. "They have too many people who were accounting for a greater concentration of shifts, so one person is accounting for two to three times as many shifts. It’s only come down just a little bit in the current environment. So, the cost of losing somebody is much, much higher than it used to be.”
When thinking about careers, ease of scheduling and digitizing mundane tasks, “This is a major difference,” he said.
“A major point of complaint that we’re seeing in c-stores relative to foodservice where foodservice has a net advantage, is in the ease of the management of the foodservice operation,” Chakravarti said.
As retailers are growing and enhancing their foodservice operations, it’s important that the job does not become “a lot harder relative to how foodservice operations are staffed.”
He added: “The one thing that for this group to think about is: How are you actually potentially bridging that gap?”
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