Rooftop career fair shines a new light on Lincoln’s workforce shortage

Vicki Westling who is charged with staffing Home Instead, an in-home health care service, pretty much summed up the scene atop the six-story parking garage at South 14th and N streets.

As the sun shone brightly, dozens of Lincoln employers set up shop outside of their cars on the multi-level rooftop and waited for those wanting jobs or a change in their careers to approach.

It was a new look from typical job fairs even if the end goal remained much the same. In a city that has a jobless rate below 2%, employers are willing to try just about anything in a market that has far more jobs than people capable of filling them.

“It’s a struggle to get people in those jobs,” said Ronesha Love, the manager of American Job Center of Lancaster and Saunders counties, which hosted the event. “We’re really trying to do what we can.”

For job seekers Victor Cabrera and Sterling Holley, they just want to work for a company that treats its workers right.

“I’ve got a job, but I want an upgrade,” said Cabrera, who took a hard look at Kawasaki on Thursday. “I’ve read about them online and came here to find out more.

“I found out there are a lot of good jobs out there right now.”

Thursday’s rooftop career fair was Love’s idea, an attempt to use the office’s most visible resource, its parking garage, to attract a new group of job seekers.

“I just kind of threw it out there — what if we do the job fair on top of the rooftop?” she said. “Everyone was like, yeah, we can do that.

“We needed to come up with something different.”

There’s no denying it was a departure from past careers, but whether it will do enough to draw job seekers in large numbers remains to be seen.

“Being outside is a good thing,” said Westling, who said she had some good conversations with a handful of potential workers in the first hour of the job fair. “It’s so different, it might entice more people to take a look. It’s a different kind of job fair.”

Mallory Mettler, a lead recruiting and retention specialist at Tabitha, liked the cross section of people who stopped by her makeshift booth, a card table containing neatly stacked pamphlets that was set up in front of her sedan.

“This is great because we get to target some other population that we don’t normally get to target,” she said, noting that a lot of her hiring comes from Nebraska’s nursing schools. “This gives us the chance to target some other populations that don’t necessarily need licenses for their careers.”

She mentioned openings at Tabitha in reception and in the accounting departments.

Lincoln’s manufacturing sector was also represented by booths from TMCO, Kawasaki and Smithfield Foods.

“I feel like being outside attracts more people,” said Ashlee Harms, the human resources manager at TMCO, the Lincoln-based metal manufacturing company. “It just seems like we have to really get more creative about filling jobs.”