Five weeks ago, Kim and Todd Mosby’s months of preparation and hard work came to fruition when they opened Five Fourteen in Jasper.
A fresh new face with a new menu in a renovated downtown space, it looked like Dubois County’s newest restaurateurs were headed straight for success, but a few snags have put a blemish on the otherwise spotless opening of the couple’s new venture: For a while at least, they had to cut their lunch hour.
“The biggest reason we had to close lunch is we just didn’t have the labor force to do lunch and dinner correctly,” Todd Mosby said. “We understand that lunch is a necessity for downtown Jasper so it was a tough decision, but if we didn’t make that decision we would have just failed day after day.”
The Mosbys have now reopened their lunch hour, treating it as a separate entity of their business that requires different strategies than their dinner hour. For example, they’ve scaled back their lunch menu and added daytime staff, Todd said, in order to get people served quicker. Todd said you can’t have the same ratio of wait staff to food runners to bussers during lunch as you do dinner, and finding those extra employees to round out his staff wasn’t easy.
At just 3 percent, Dubois County’s unemployment rate is the lowest in the state and well below the national average of 5.4 percent, which is considered nearly full employment by economists.
While a low unemployment rate is great for the county, it poses a major problem for local businesses. For the Mosby family, staffing the restaurant has become an extremely difficult task for two reasons — one being that 97 percent of the county's workforce is already employed, the second being those who are looking for a job are often under-qualified or their skill set and experience don’t meet the necessary qualifications for what many employers are looking for, particularly in the areas of attendance and work performance.
“That’s a typical relationship that you see when you get above full employment,” said Joe Frank, spokesperson with the Indiana Department of Workforce Development. “Once you get below full employment (4.5 to 5 percent), it ends up being an Economics 101 supply and demand issue. Businesses actually have to compete for employees.”
A big part of the problem in Dubois County is workers merely not showing up once they’ve been hired. Local trends have seen new hires show up for one or two shifts before falling off the map with little to no communication as to why.
“We’ve had a few people who have decided not to show up after a day or two,” Mosby said. “You’d prefer it not work out that way, but if they don’t want to be there that’s better anyway. If someone isn’t interested in making everything that walks out of that kitchen with a passion, then we don’t want them here.”
Five Fourteen isn’t the only local business that’s had problems with new hires bolting.
Gail Hettinger, co-owner of Jasper’s Schnitzelbank, Hampton Inn and Schnitz Brew Pub, said she’s experienced the same problem at both the Schnitz and Hampton Inn. The classic move is for a new hire to work enough to get one or two paychecks before bouncing to another job. She has even seen new hires leave without saying a word before they hit their first break.
“We hired extra people over (at the Schnitz) knowing we were going to lose some of them,” Hettinger said.
Whereas staffing the Schnitz and Hampton Inn has proven difficult, the Schnitzelbank seems to always have a stable group of skilled and loyal employees. That’s a rare find in a laborer’s market where demand for employees allows new hires to frivolously pick and choose from a huge supply of jobs across the county, according to Hettinger. She said there have been occasions where she and fellow owners have cleaned rooms at the Hampton Inn during peak season.
“I’ve been in the business for 25, 30 years, and you go through bouts of this, but this (situation) seems like it’s going to hang around,” she said. “We have a core group of wait staff and cooks over at the Schnitzelbank and we’re very thankful for that.”
B Joe Aull, co-owner of the Mill House restaurant in Jasper, said his eatery hasn’t encountered problems retaining employees, but filling open positions hasn’t been easy. Most of the time, when they lose an employee it’s because they’re moving forward in their career or leaving to attend college.
Aull said the Mill House had the best success with new hires when their current employees recommend someone or when family and friends know of a teenager looking for part-time work, but those teenagers are few and far between these days.
“We’re seeing very similar issues (to the Schnitz and Five Fourteen) because we’ve been actively trying to hire people for a few months,” Aull said. “It seems like teenagers aren’t working as much as they were maybe 10 to 20 years ago. We just can’t get that many (high school aged people) to apply.”
Hettinger also noted that the pool of high school candidates has shrunk in recent years, pointing to the amount of extra-curricular activities that local schools offer — a necessary pursuit for those looking to attend college — as a reason for the downturn in teens seeking employment.
“We look for a lot of bussers, but we don’t find high school kids like we used to,” she said. “There’s so much stuff for them to be involved with we try and be flexible with sports, band and other things like that.”
At Five Fourteen, the Mosbys’ search process has also led them toward hiring people with little to no experience. Todd Mosby said he and his wife look for commitment, passion and those who are looking to make a career out of what they do. He said they pulled in three people with no experience and trained them for three months before the business opened.
“We hired one young man from Loogootee, he’s the smoker and line cook, and he had such a passion we immediately knew we wanted to make a place for him,” he said. “It wasn’t long he became a very important part of our staff.”
Hettinger and Aull both said they’ve turned to other counties to fill the void of laborers, but attracting them to Dubois County has been difficult.
Mosby, who also serves as president and CEO of the Gibson County Economic Development Corp., said he’d love to see the population of Jasper and the county as a whole increase. He believes attracting an additional 5,000 families to Dubois County would be optimal, but that will take time through a focused effort on improving housing, infrastructure and quality of life.
Ed Cole, president of the economic development group Dubois Strong, said low unemployment is a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. He believes Dubois County will be competing for workforce with other southern Indiana counties for years to come, but efforts to improve downtown sectors, street infrastructure, parks and local entertainment all play a factor in making the county standout.
Cole said he’s proud to see Jasper, Huntingburg and Ferdinand are all leading the charge in looking to “improve the quality of life and quality of place in Dubois County.”
Mosby agrees but believes growth needs to be paramount to extinguish the pressure that the lack of workforce is applying to local businesses.
“We have to build and grow to attract more people,” Mosby said. “Dubois County has done a good job with this, but it absolutely needs to continue. There needs to be much more.”