Even as the local economy continues to hum along, riding the extended recovery wave in recent months, some of the town’s small businesses are struggling to fill vacancies, in order to meet the rising demand.
While Apopka has long had steady demographics in its favor, and is located a mere 18 miles from Orlando, the dominance of affluent households in this region often means difficulty in recruiting for blue-collar jobs. In fact, Florida has the second highest job turnover rate in the US so far this year.
Local businesses, however, have since adopted various novel methods to deal with this shortfall, some of which can be replicated for businesses of all types and sizes.
Going old-school still works best in this idyllic town, and as such, advertising your vacancies via brochures, banners, and notice boards tend to bring in a variety of responses. There is no shortage of tools to create professional flyers, and once that’s ready, all you need is someone to distribute it across town, to get the phones ringing right away.
In spite of the skewed supply curves, just placing a ‘for-hire’ sign on shop windows should generate a few walk-ins, while going out of your way to advertise your vacancies via flyers and brochures should result in a wide pool of prospective candidates to choose from.
Being located close to Orlando presents business owners with a large labor pool of qualified candidates to suit a wide range of jobs and positions.
With this, it would be a mistake to focus your hiring efforts entirely on a town of 12,000 people, especially since placing the same ad on Craigslist Orlando can bring in substantially more candidates and options to choose from.
There are other job boards, portals, and classified sites that help in targeting the whole of Orange County, and the Orlando metropolitan area, which should significantly enhance your chances of finding the right candidates, as opposed to just advertising in Apopka.
Filling vacancies in rural, suburban, and small town regions will prove to be difficult, no matter what novel solution is adopted by businesses. Not only is the volume of applicants on the lower end, business owners will have to loosen their requirements by a great extent to succeed here.
The solution, however, is to broaden your search and extend beyond the usual avenues, not just in advertising, or marketing the vacancies, but even when it comes to the overall requirements.
For example, instead focusing entirely on Gen Z, or millennials for a retail establishment, consider bending the rule in favor of retirees, or go easy on the qualifications and experience requirements, especially when they aren’t absolutely essential.
Even though labor participation by women is higher than ever before, their share in blue collar jobs still remains slim. This can mostly be attributed to unsuitable, often male-dominated working conditions, that many women find undesirable.
If you’re stuck in a remote location with scant labor supply, consider making the place friendly for women to significantly broaden the pool of potential applicants. There are quite a lot of women, who still spend their days as homemakers, merely because they cannot find anything that suits their requirements.
Apopka remains in a similar position, with its share of women in the workforce lower than the national, and even the state average.
Apopka is an undeniably great market to do business, but remains weighed down by certain demographics and income trends. An enterprising entrepreneur, however, can overcome this with a number of measures as discussed above, all the while adding plenty of value to the broader community.
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