Whistler Job Market: Labour Summit

When Tim Sjogren arrived in Whistler in 1998, jobs were tight and accommodation even tighter. The second-year ski instructor spent the winter sleeping on a friend’s couch and juggling two jobs: teaching skiing by day and stocking shelves at a local grocery store at night. And Sjogren had it good. He remembers seeing people standing on the side of the road, begging.

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When Tim Sjogren arrived in Whistler in 1998, jobs were tight and accommodation even tighter. The second-year ski instructor spent the winter sleeping on a friend’s couch and juggling two jobs: teaching skiing by day and stocking shelves at a local grocery store at night. And Sjogren had it good. He remembers seeing people standing on the side of the road, begging.

Instead of “Spare some change?” their piece of cardboard read: “Will work for place to sleep.” In those days, besides part-time work, job openings were slim and competition was fierce. “There’s no way you could walk in and get a bartending job,” Sjogren, 33, remembers. Even those with years of experience had to swallow their pride and start at the bottom. After a few seasons busing tables and then slinging food, they might land the privilege of pouring drinks to the après-ski crowd. Now, eight years later, the Whistler labour landscape has changed dramatically. “I know someone who just got a job waiting tables at one of the big bars without any experience at all,” says Sjogren, who is now assistant manager of a ski school. “She’d never even bused before.” Competition on the labour front remains fierce in this idyllic alpine tourist town, but now it’s the employers fighting over employees. The Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort and other big businesses in town spend the off-season scouring the globe for staff. Help Wanted signs hang in almost every store window. One restaurant has offered iPods as a signing bonus for dishwashers. Many businesses are offering end-of-season bonuses just to keep staff. Job classifieds in the local Pique newspaper are in two different languages, English and Japanese, and about three pages longer than they were last year. “It’s crazy,” Sjogren says. “I don’t know how all the businesses are going to function come Christmas.” Despite the resort town’s reputation for immunity from the economic realities elsewhere in B.C., and despite most ski magazines ranking it as the best ski hill in the world (it has held the top spot for 10 years running in Skiing magazine), Whistler is in the grips of a severe labour shortage. The local chamber of commerce figures the Sea to Sky corridor needs a whopping 4,000 extra employees to keep the resort running by 2010. Finding skilled and good staff is getting harder and, like a hung-over ski bum late for work, the resort is just now waking up to reality. “The smackdown came last year,” says Kirby Brown, Whistler Blackcomb employee experience (HR) director, from inside Dusty’s Bar & Grill, the iconic Whistler Creekside watering hole. Referring to the annual job fair, he says, “We used to get hundreds and hundreds of walk-ins. In 2005, we didn’t get any.” He describes the three factors that kept applicants away: demographics – fewer people in the 18-to-30 age bracket; a crappy ski season in 2004; and the allure of higher-paying jobs in Alberta and elsewhere in B.C. As Brown talks, the 2006 Whistler Blackcomb job fair is wrapping up behind him. Over three days in late October, 1,400 job seekers were interviewed and 780 of them were hired. However, Brown needs 1,200 to run the ski hill, as well as the hotels and restaurants Intrawest owns at Whistler. So why is he smiling under his beard, instead of sweating? Brown’s staff spent the summer at job fairs around the world, visiting 12 cities in Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and South America, as well as six cities in eastern Canada. They pre-hired 455 employees, compared to just 67 in 2005. And it’s not the only thing Brown is doing to find employees. The ski hill is working on ways of attracting new immigrants from Vancouver up to the mountain to fill jobs. Brown also moved the entire job-application process online and shortened the job fair from 10 days to three to improve recruiting and retention rates. “We’re trying not to let potential staff fall through our fingers,” he says. “If we don’t hire them quickly they might look for a job somewhere else.” Brown admits that in a tight job market there is competition between businesses for employees, especially in restaurant and guest services. Being the biggest kid in town means Intrawest could bully its way to the front of the pack, but that wouldn’t be good for the all-important Whistler experience. “We want to ensure the whole community is viable,” he says. “As a big employer, we have to be careful.” Wages in Intrawest-owned restaurants, for instance, are typically a buck or two lower than the competition. Brown says perks, such as free ski passes, employee housing and discounts on food, keep staff loyal. His concern now is how to keep all those employees happy. Mid-winter attrition happens – homesickness, bad snow and bad apples – and when it does, Brown doesn’t know where he’s going to find replacements. “Our strategy is retention,” he says. “We are going to treat them so well they don’t want to go.” When Brown showed up in Whistler from Nova Scotia in 1993, he was just happy to get a job. “Now the job is a given and everything else is expected,” he says. Employees want respect, rewards and involvement in decision-making, or they’ll walk. Supervisors and managers on the hill are being trained to deal with this new generation of employee. And Whistler Blackcomb is doing its best to make sure the rest of the businesses in town are too, by offering discounted ski passes for staff that take the Spirit Program, a guest-relations course put on by the chamber of commerce. “We want everyone on the same page,” Brown says. One of the big problems is that small companies, the ones most in need of extra staff as the Olympics approach, can’t afford to go overseas to recruit staff. Brown’s staffing needs on the hill increase as infrastructure, such as new lifts, is added, which means the number of employees he requires on the hill in 2010 will be only slightly higher than this year. But Louise Lundy, president of the Whistler Chamber of Commerce, knows other businesses in town will require a lot more, as they need to grow in line with the increased number of visitors. In fact, if everyone in the Sea to Sky corridor worked full-time, the area would still require an additional 3,500 employees by 2010. Lundy had no idea of the extent of the problem when she started as president in April of 2006, but she quickly became an expert. “We’re competing against every other ski hill in western Canada. We have to be proactive.” All across B.C. and Alberta, ski hills and resort towns are facing the same problem as Whistler, she adds. Lundy has spent 75 per cent of her time since April focused on labour issues, talking to business and lobbying government. “We need great strategies in place,” she says. “It’s something a lot of businesses have never thought about before. But compared to our competition, we have a lot of things to sell. I mean, this is Whistler.” The chamber hired an HR specialist in September to focus on attracting people, leaving Lundy free to work on priorities like changing the working-holiday visa program. It only takes five minutes in Whistler to know where a huge chunk of the workforce comes from. Everyone seems to have an Australian, Kiwi or U.K. accent. Legally, these visitors can only work for one year in Canada on a working-holiday visa. “If they could stay for longer, that would be fantastic,” Lundy says. The federal immigration minister, Monte Solberg, visited Whistler in September and told Lundy he’d look into it. But it’s no slam dunk. The holiday visa is a reciprocal arrangement and Australia, especially, is facing a hospitality labour shortage and demographic crunch of its own, and may not be enthusiastic about losing its youth for longer periods. Until that is sorted out, Lundy is making sure everyone who arrives looking for a job is welcomed. In the past, many young people got off the bus in Whistler for the first time, looked for a job and a place to stay, couldn’t find either and got back on the bus and went home. No one wants to rent to someone who doesn’t have a job and most employers don’t want to hire someone who doesn’t have a place to live. The closing of the Shoestring Lodge, the only hostel in Whistler, made things worse. Its 115 beds, the cheapest in town, sheltered many newcomers. Lundy saw easing the initial housing crunch as a good place to start. The chamber asked other hotels to step up and fill the lost beds. B & Bs and hotels, such as the Holiday Inn, offered rooms at huge discounts – $20 to $40 a night – for short-term stays during the fall, creating 315 beds. Then Lundy transformed the Visitor Info Centre into a welcome station. Signs directed people stepping off the Greyhound to the VIC, where they could get a free welcome bag with maps, hints, coupons, local newspapers and a list of affordable accommodation options. It’s only a start, Lundy admits. “We don’t know where we’re going to steal people from,” she says. “Even the Maritimes can’t find people.” There’s no way tourism can grow without people, so in late 2005 Tourism Whistler, with funding from Services Canada (formerly HRSDC), hired Vancouver-based hospitality industry HR consultants go2 to develop a 10-year HR strategy for the entire Sea to Sky corridor. Victoria-based economist Ruth Emery evaluated the problem and now a steering committee – comprised of businesses, First Nations, municipal, provincial and federal agencies and go2 – is working on strategies to address the labour shortage. “This is a region-wide issue, not just a Whistler problem,” says John Leschyson, go2’s director of industry HR development and a member of the steering committee. The committee is set to approve and then implement its strategies in 2007. A major focus, Leschyson says, will be staff retention. Emery’s report found retention at the end of the winter is close to zero in Whistler. In other words, when the lifts stop turning, businesses lay off employees and almost everyone in town packs up and moves on. Whistler Blackcomb has 1,200 full-time staff on the hill and on the ground year-round, compared to the 3,500 it takes to make the place run over the high season. Most of the full-timers live in Pemberton or Squamish. When it comes to losing staff, dishwashing and housekeeping are the worst; those positions see almost monthly turnover as employees look for anything better. This negatively affects the bottom line of restaurants and hotels through lost hiring, training and efficiency costs, not to mention the effect on staff morale. After two and a half years of poor retention in those positions, Four Seasons Resort Whistler went to Australia and South America to find a new kind of Whistler employee, and the company is digging deep into its coffers to keep them. Reena Verma, director of HR, returned with 130 of the 215 employees she needs, all of whom already have hospitality skills. The South and Central Americans, especially, don’t fit the typical Whistlerite mould – they’re there for the paycheques, not the lifestyle. Verma says the Mexican room attendants she hired are content to work for a few seasons, with stints at home in between. “They’re going to stay for one or two years,” she says. “They’re happy to stay in the jobs others use as a stepping stone. It adds stability, which has a positive impact on the bottom line, the employee experience and the guest experience.” Pre-hiring also gave certainty to the hotel. There’s no waiting to see who and how many people will show up come November. And to motivate them to stick around, the hotel is offering end-of-season bonuses for the first time. Overall, Verma says, the labour shortage has a silver lining for businesses. “It made us look at our HR policies, how we treat and retain staff,” she says. “We really had to come up with a strategy.” Everyone admits that, in the past, a lot of businesses in Whistler took advantage of their staff, something they can’t do now that their staff has the upper hand. For Karl Gregg, VP of operations for Lot 3 Inc., owners of the Whistler Crab Shack Steakhouse & Oyster Bar, incentive programs and perks are the way to motivate staff to stick around, and such tactics have never been more important. One of the restaurant’s liquor partners took staff to Vancouver for a weekend and regularly hands out concert tickets and clothing. Gregg reduced the size of the menu and dumbed down the dishes to make the job easier for staff members with little or no understanding of the restaurant business. “It makes it easier to have young and inexperienced staff without sacrificing service,” he says. The Crab Shack’s strategy is echoed by retail and restaurant businesses throughout town. The High Mountain Brewhouse is also coping with less skilled staff. It’s one of the biggest bars and restaurants in town, with 100-plus employees. Instead of skills, GM Chris van der Linden focused on personality when interviewing for the 50 positions he needed to fill before December 15. And when it came to cooks, he was even less choosy. “If a cook walks in I’ll hire them on the spot,” he says. “Even if I don’t need them.” They’re in such demand that Linden, too, has simplified his menu and, in order to retain staff, he pays some of the highest wages in Whistler. Still, he’s concerned about having enough workers to make it through the season’s rush. Recruiting workers to this alpine paradise remains tough, but there are some signs current efforts are working. And Immigration Minister Monte Solberg made recruiting foreign workers easier in November. “But we’re definitely not out of the woods yet,” cautions Whistler’s Kirby Brown. “We can’t sit back and relax.” In early December, despite record snowfalls, Whistler Blackcomb was still losing staff due to lack of housing and there are no replacement workers for mid-season attrition. The Olympics are only three years away. Summer business is growing – Tourism Whistler says 2006 was the busiest summer on record, and Verma says it’s harder to find summer staff than winter. “We have to stay focused on this problem,” Brown says. “Or it will cost us.”