Businesses share employee expectations at Red River Career Expo

Businesses looking for prospective employees hoped to find what they were looking for last week at the Red River Career Expo at Cameron University.

Surman Bland, a recruiter of Peak Behavioral Health, said they’re trying to expand to help more people in the community.

“We’re having a hard time finding women who are as passionate about working with children in the community,” Bland said. “A lot of the kids that we work with, they do have an autism diagnosis, and as a behavioral technician, you do have to work through behavior. A lot of times with people who have those behaviors, it can be mentally and emotionally as well as physically exhausting.”

Bland said that burnout is small, but they take great care of their employees.

“We try to combat (burnout) by scheduling, like, a block schedule, so that we don’t get burned out, as well as providing the support that they need when they need help, even though we are in-home therapists,” Bland said. “Within home therapy, a lot of the times it’s like we’re on little islands working together, but not seeing each other as often. So, I think that collaboration sometimes is hard.”

Nikole Repp, another recruiter for Peak Behavioral Health, said one of the challenges they face with retaining employees is due to living in a military town.

“I feel like, in general, we are just a military town,” Repp said. “People come in and they move away.”

Repp and Bland said one other challenge was finding people who truly have the passion to help children.

“When they find out that we are working through behaviors and not just going in and playing with kiddos, there are learning opportunities that you have to create to teach skills that they need,” Repp and Bland said. “People tend to get nervous sometimes, and hesitant real quick. You see a kid crying and your instinct is to coddle them instead of working through that behavior and helping them understand those coping mechanisms.”

Bland said they combat burnout by reimbursing their employees as much as they can.

“Anytime spent on admin work, we make sure that we give our techs compensation for that, as well as giving them drive time and mileage compensation,” Bland said. “We do a lot of incentives throughout, like every six months, you’re eligible for a raise.”

Repp said job candidates have to be intrigued by behavioral science. Peak Health has positions available for Registered Behavior Technicians.

Ashley Swarens, a recruiter for the Oklahoma division of the FBI, said they are looking for hard working, dedicated employees who enjoy helping people.

Swarens said one of the challenges they face when hiring employees is when people don’t do well in the interview. When it comes to retaining employees, Swarens said entry level positions are hard to staff, due to the employee’s move to higher positions.

When it comes to the wage obstacle, Swarens said the jurisdiction goes to the Department of Justice, since they set their salary.

Swarens said all jobs are available at www.fbijobs.gov. They are recruiting for two IT positions.

Danny Cox, Farm Loan Manager at the Oklahoma Division of the USDA, said there has been a lot of turnover in personnel due to employees retiring in recent years.

“There’s gonna be more than normal turnover,” Cox said. “There’s lots of openings in this area and there’s lots of opportunities because USDA is involved in so many different facets of agriculture and other things.”

Robert Payne, Comanche County Executive Director of the Oklahoma USDA, said there are a ton of opportunities across the nation.

“I have two employees, out of the four of us who are eligible to retire, they can walk out any day,” Payne said. “My other one is an ambitious young lady and she’s putting in applications everywhere. So, literally tomorrow, she could accept a job and the other two could retire and I could be in that office by myself.”

Payne said they’re always on the lookout for qualified, hard driving, ambitious employees who want to learn.

“What we do is invest taxpayer dollars in the Ag sector to keep food cheap for the American consumer,” Payne said. “So, our jobs are important. We help feed the country. We’re always looking for good qualified people to fill those positions.”

Payne said it’s getting harder to get people to apply.

“Twenty years ago, whenever I applied for the trainee position that led me to this job, I was one of 84 (applicants),” Payne said. “Within the last few months, we had a recruiting for the same type of position. We only got 19 applicants. So the number of good, qualified applicants is for people with a degree in the field. People with experience in the field are just getting smaller and smaller. That seems like people don’t want to work anymore.”

Payne said they offer many incentives, including holidays off.

“We offer competitive salaries, retirement, we only work five days a week for 40 hours, we’ve got several different work schedules,” Payne said. “We offer part-time telework for our positions. So there’s lots of opportunities.”

Payne said they have a scale and set of circumstances that allow them to move people up when it comes to wages and retainment.

“Where we’ve had a little bit of difficulty is with the government not giving us cost of living increases,” Payne said. “It’s made us less competitive. Our salaries, in comparison to what they used to be, we used to be kind of top of the market, especially in smaller communities. Now we’re far less competitive than we used to be because they held us off on cost of living increases for so many years. I think we went close to 10 years in a row without a cost of living adjustment, which made a significant impact on our competitive side salary.”