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[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello everyone my name is rick jenkins and i'm coming to you today on behalf of sc biz news the media company that serves high level business executives in south carolina welcome to sc biz tv today we'll be discussing how the pandemic has impacted the labor market in south carolina and the employment outlook moving forward here to help me with the conversation is herb dew herb is the founder and ceo at hti or human technologies incorporated hti is one of the southeast most innovative and versatile hiring partners specializing in industrial staffing professional recruiting and plant start-ups and expansions her welcome thank you good to be here it's good to have you here i appreciate you coming by i know you were busy uh but you know i think this is a really important conversation and for our viewers to know we're going to be doing an outlook not only on employment which of course you'll need today but construction and commercial real estate as well we kind of think those are the three harbingers of where we are and hopefully where we're going as we come out of this craziness that was 2020. now i know it's exciting 2021 is a new start right and uh things look good things look good so we would keep going that's exactly right that's exactly right herb you founded uh ht i believe in 1999. we did you have uh you're headquartered in greenville several offices in south carolina and partnerships in six seven states give us that quick elevator speech well we started in greenwood moved to greenville in uh 2001 and that's our home office now and uh we operate in actually nine states now so we've grown quite a bit but our core is south carolina and that's that's where uh our corporate offices and all of our sales efforts uh start start here in south carolina and uh at our core we're a human resource company that's foundation really is tied to labor right um most people see us as a staffing company but really our growth over the next five years i think is going to be in this idea of helping companies see themselves in their use of labor as an intentional asset and how can they go ahead and gain a more engaged workforce that that includes bringing new people in so we're very close to the workforce here in south carolina got it 2020 a year like no other i think it's safe to say a year that none of us have seen even close to the likes of that's crazy a year ago we were cruising around along nicely weren't we unemployment rates were minuscule then march 6 i believe the first cases of covid in south carolina were announced a week later the governor begins shutting down the state here we are a year later almost and things are rough uh how did hti come through this over the past year gosh i think we were i think we were like most employers and in our sector employment that was the first thing that really got crushed so um in our case because we support a lot of manufacturing um we really saw by the end of march uh plants shutting down across the state uh because we support the entire state we're in charleston columbia as well as the upstate and really for that sort of period of end of march through april through may and really into june we were running at a quarter of our normal run rate um permanent full-time hiring was stopped nobody was hiring full-time people you did see some minimal layoffs you saw shutdowns or furloughs happening so i would say more so than 2008-2009 the scariest period i've managed through was that period of sort of april may and june because we didn't know i mean you know who's faced a pandemic that's right right and and i think companies were really innovating on the fly and trying to figure out how to keep their businesses stable through that period speaking of innovation that's a good segue one of the words that became common use in our business lexicon over the past year has been pivot pivot uh so many of us have pivoted right i mean sc biz tv that we're on right now was kind of one of our pivots what was an hti pivot oh gosh i think we had a couple uh that were significant i think early on uh it was could we operate because we're a retail business in the sense that people come in and apply at branches could we then operate from home so we immediately went to where we had to operate figure out how to fill jobs because we had a lot of customers that were essential so we had to go ahead and continue to fill jobs and and support those customers but could we do it without having branch traffic which really that that situation we faced forced us to look and say hey we could do that and really pivot to being able to operate and fill jobs without necessarily having people sit in branches so that was a significant one um and and i would say another one was really figuring out how can we go ahead and do large-scale hiring but not do it indoors we actually invented i'll take credit for this but the drive-through job fair yes hti started that you're seeing a lot of companies now doing drive-through job fairs that are keep keeping people safe but you know running a lot of people uh through job fairs but that was something we invented back in march and started doing and all of a sudden now i see people doing drive-through job fairs all the time but um you've got a really cool vehicle we do the job mobile is is out there and hopefully a lot of people have seen the big green job mobile driving around but uh because we can actually orient drug tests we can e-verify we can do everything on that job mobile so we can literally be in front of a customer site and do all the hiring and they can start the next day right out of that jaw mobile you know one of the ways that this pandemic has impacted me the most is and a lot of people in this boat but lack of interaction you know i i like interaction i like to uh hang out with friends and family and colleagues and go to networking events and all that kind of stuff well i haven't done that for the most part in eight nine months whatever it's been and i got to tell you i'm a little depressed man i'm not happy about it but a lot of people aren't happy right yep yeah and if you see if you take a look at surveys around the country i mean 2020 there was a real it was a real reduction in in happiness um and i think that that's something that has a lot of factors i think certainly um one of the things we're learning with people working from home is that disconnect with their team and i think we're still working through what that's going to look like and how we're going to land long term i think you're going to see companies shift a lot and you're going to see people have maybe hybrid models where they are in office on scheduled days and they work from home on certain days as well but gosh i think the politics of the time i think um the the constantly changing information regarding the virus and what we should do regarding that i think just created a general i don't want to say depression but just an unease yeah just cause people to feel less happy right in 2020 you sent me the link on the story that i read uh that you know it was was behind uh those statistics you know one thing i found interesting was if i remember right the united states dropped year to year in terms of the happiness quotient from 79 to 70. uh but china went from something up to 93.93 up to 93. now personally i think that's because they're not allowed to be unhappy in china you know i i will say this i mean if you take a look at europe europe's experiencing the same proportionally the same feelings i think the idea that you can't go out to dinner with friends you've got to wear a mask constantly you're seeing you know communities even if you look at the us i mean each state is really handling it very differently if you went out and sort of looked at happiness in the different states i think you'd see a lot of differences in that i'm really proud of south carolina because i feel like we've managed that pretty well and i know there are people watching that may have differences of opinion on that but generally speaking i think i was actually surprised statistically that there wasn't a deeper drop i was too weren't you i was expecting to really see maybe we're at 30 35 percent i mean you can't see that really catastrophic drop but i think what happened was i think what you saw in people is really reconnect with their families maybe reconnect more intimately with a friendship group or their kids or whatever it happened to be to go ahead and sort actually what's interesting to see is how many more people and i don't have that graph to show you but i was looking at it this morning how many more people began exercising that weren't exercising like small things like that where they worked on themselves before during that period well i'll tell you what after making that comment about china if i get killed by a drone a little bit later today you'll know what happened you and i are not wanting to move to china that's going to increase our happiness that's right that's right let's talk about labor i mentioned earlier that the unemployment rate minuscule uh a year ago now i mean we were uh all-time lows basically right and then the pandemic hit it spiked huge uh then it has come back down quicker actually than i thought it would let's talk about that roller coaster ride oh yeah yeah we'll take a look at that i mean you can see in january we were one of the lowest you know in the united states um and this is just to educate sort of viewers anytime you're down below three percent i mean there's a percentage of the population that has chosen not to be employed so there's an unemployable percentage in there so we were really almost at zero unemployment uh back in january and that was really true going into march and you can see what happened you know when um in hospitality still crushed uh several industries that are impacted by this particularly in the lower part of the state where you see they're really tied to tourism right um so you could see what happened but but take a look i mean we're a state that really if you look at other states we're number four five in the country as far as recovering back on uh unemployment so we're back to where we're pretty healthy on unemployment and you know um that 4.4 percent in south carolina is still largely industries that are are still struggling a little bit but a lot of those people are redeployed into other sectors so um so i love that particularly when you look at other states and how that compares in other states so if you're in california you're not going to see that kind of recovery if you're in michigan you're not going to see that kind of recovery but south carolina and some of the other southern states you really see that kind of rebound and i think that again speaks to how we pivoted as a state around trying to get businesses back open and working again well when i saw it i thought it had to be a mistake to be quite honest with you because just because of the hospitality industry i mean let's face it it drives the low country in many ways and we all know it was decimated and because of that i certainly did not expect to see this but let's talk about other industries um i've got another slide here somewhere yep hardest hit industries uh besides hospitality tell me what we're looking at in south carolina yeah so what you're looking at in south carolina these would be the five industries that haven't seen a bounce back yet and obviously leisure and hospitality as you would expect by far the hardest hit so that's going to be you know people that support airlines people that support uh cruise ships uh people you know just anything related to tourism is getting hit with that and even putting on event planning i mean that's a you know we've got a lot of small businesses that support event planning but all of a sudden now they don't have events that they support that that you know you see happen all the time um but but also you know uh those organizations that are supporting schools right you know when the schools were out and and kids were doing school at home you know people that were supporting cafeterias and all that sort of thing that's that's tied to sort of those sectors there so um i think information is interesting i actually think you're going to see that really and i think it's already beginning to come back because what you're seeing happen now is with this work from home emphasis that i think is going to stick companies are beginning to innovate and figure out how do we go ahead and adjust so that we can take advantage and have technology that deploys to go ahead and assist making that work and then trade transportation utilities and then natural resources and mining i can't speak as much to that i'm not exactly sure why that's down my suspicion there is that's that's tied largely to the slowdown that we saw in april and may where just you saw uh resources grind to a halt because manufacturing is down because a lot of those industries are supporting manufacturing so those will probably recover but they're just recovering slowly because inventory is going to be built back up what are some industries that actually thrived during the past year are there any yeah sure i think uh i think um you know uh you you saw a lot of well what's interesting is after you know after april may june july staffing started coming back so my industry has really been growing like crazy since then because like even now i just checked this because i knew i was gonna be talking with you this morning but we have 580 openings right now here in here in south carolina just in south carolina 580 openings right now and that's the highest number we've ever had as a company so i think isn't that crazy and that's cross-sector so that's going across a number of different sectors not just manufacturing so um i do think um i think manufacturing's rebounded substantially you know car vehicles suvs in particular pickups in particular being sold like crazy i'm not even sure who's buying these but bmw is back to running full but i think all of those industries that are supporting manufacturing are doing really well and then you know what's really been interesting is anything supporting safety is really done well so if you're at centos for example as a company and now you're having to sell masks or cleanser or anything like that it makes sense right those would be really doing well but also testing clinics uh so anybody that's doing testing it's helping companies with their testing they're doing really really really well as well right so so people that you would expect would do well are doing really well uh you brought up manufacturing so let's stick there for a minute of course we all know how important manufacturing is in the state of south carolina as a matter of fact you know in the upstate of south carolina it's one of the fastest growing advanced manufacturing hubs in the southeast 12 percent of the folks in south carolina have some type of manufacturing job and they pay well too seventy thousand dollars on average for an annual uh salary in that industry how did manufacturing do it started out rough tons of them pivoted give us the rundown on manufacturing so the thing i love about manufacturing as an as a general sector is you know for us to compete with germany japan china some of those countries american manufacturing really through the 70s and 80s had to evolve and become nimble so i think by by the very nature of being successful here in the us it had to be innovative so i think they were positioned well for this so if you took a look at you know march april may they very quickly did what they had to do to stay ready and then as soon as production picked back up they were able to sort of reengage very very quickly because i think they're just positioned that way right so if you took a look at july which was a crazy month because everybody was staffing back up that's probably the that was probably the most insane month i've ever worked through because simultaneously thousands of employees were being you know redeployed being brought off furlough being brought off unemployment and then going back to work um so july august september really by the end of september we're almost at our run rate that we're at in february and mar h and if you take a look at the numbers now we're actually running ahead of where we were in february and march from last year so we've hit that level we're at and we're above it and that's that's a testament really to south carolina and as a testament to manufacturing companies being able to go ahead and stay stay tight and you didn't see layoffs i mean companies didn't lay people off they furloughed them utilized the unemployment insurance that came down through the cares act i thought managed that well and and made sure that they protected their people so they didn't lose that talent somewhere else i'm glad you brought that up let's talk about that the paycheck protection program right um was that why did you see that widely used i mean did we save a whole lot of jobs because of that i i actually think i think we did i i think particularly if you were a restaurant if you're you're a small business um and you were you know a company that really you know week to week month to month is making payroll i think those companies and we had high utilization in south carolina i think those companies that are payroll intensive or service intensive i think they took advantage of that and that helped a lot i actually think the unemployment legislation in the short term helped a ton as well because i think it gave companies the ability to go ahead and furlough people but while they're on unemployment they were able to maintain or actually make more than what they were making now it's a little bit of a disincentive now because it's getting people back to work and they're making a lot of money while their unemployment so there was a little friction there back in september october um i will say this i think the legislation passed by both parties back in may april may june i think did what it needed to do to keep us whole and healthy through the middle part of the year end of the year right manufacturing you you were sticking on that for a second you were quoted in a recent story that that we ran um that said that manufacturing hiring a lot but hiring blue-collar workers not as many white-collar workers how long do you think it's going to be before those folks are hired back it's it's already it's already started we've had the biggest increase in white collar hiring like january january it's not unusual for companies in december to sort of stop hiring because the process of trying to get people in for interviews because of the holidays it slows down so we had the largest increase in white collar openings in january of 2021 that we've ever had and i think what companies did was stop hiring back in april may i think they ran as lean as they could if they had turnover they collapsed on that as a savings but i think what's happening now is i think facilities plants even non-manufacturing companies are saying wait a minute i need to fill that accounting job or that engineering job or that sales job and so we're seeing a huge amount of hiring beginning which is great news for the people that were unemployed and are starting to look for jobs because a lot of people out there the unemployment didn't get them all the way home for their salary so i would say in the first and second quarter you're going to see a lot of recovery in that area good to hear yeah let's switch gears uh working from home you know i think herman you're going to be the one to answer this but i think when all this is said and done there are going to be more people where you know when the pandemic knock on all the wood we can find is safely behind us i think this is going to be one thing that sticks and that more people than ever are going to be working from home and i think that companies will have discovered that we can work remotely and uh and save money because we don't need as much brick and mortar right are that true yep so something i tell all my young leaders disruption if it's managed well breeds innovation right so i don't think you would have seen all these companies face work from home unless they had had to right so i think that disruption of being shut down or uh being forced to go ahead and isolate would have caused so many companies to go ahead and explore the idea that can we be effective working from home and i think the discovery they all had was a it really worked with people's lifestyle particularly with the younger generation that has a a very close connection to your work and how do you connect that to my my personal life right so and you can see here we only had 3.4 percent of companies that really had active work from home policies we were forced through the pandemic to go to 88 returning to 56.8 percent but 41 percent of people right now are currently fully remote and i don't think that number changes a ton maybe it goes down to 35 40 percent now what companies are really struggling with right now is how do you maintain synergy on a team and i talked to the company the other day that my daughter works at a large local employer that is well thought of here in the upstate and they are still fully remote but one of the things that they're doing is re-engineering their workspace to have a day in which the teams come in they're able to be together they can work through problems they can share they can they can build synergy but they still largely work from home so what that's going to do for them is reduced by 75 the space they actually need to maintain to work from now i wonder what this means for commercial real estate in the short term but i think in the long term you know that'll catch up we're short on a lot of commercial real estate anyway here in the upstate but um but yeah i think you're going to see you're going to see a lot of innovation around work from home and i think the the challenge now is going to be how do you maintain creativity and innovation being remote with each other right and you mentioned shared workspaces um and yeah i think that i think that's going to be where we're going um what about you guys how are you all going to do this we actually we're actually talking about this right now at hdi because you know we found we have an awful lot of roles that they don't have to sit downtown in the office or necessarily sit in the branches so i think you'll see us do what many other companies are doing and that's how do you how do you innovate the space to go ahead and work for innovation and teams and synergy but also be landing spots so people could come in and work because some people will say i like working from from a place i can go maybe i've got three kids and i can't i get distracted easily so how can we give people choices and then how do we build the system around accountability so that we know you're getting your job done but you have a place that you can land and then we bring teams together on some scheduled basis so that they have that time together and i think you're going to see across the nation a lot of innovation on that agree let's talk vaccine okay um it's a big topic right now you know on this i've been getting calls on i heard it was a big topic um so how many calls are you getting from folks saying can my employer make me take the vaccine or can i make my employee take the vaccine how are those conversations happening and what is the answer gosh i think the answer is um i think the answer is a complex one because i think you have a population right now that's uneducated about the vaccine so i think statistically we saw what 20 percent of the population is afraid or doesn't like the idea of taking the vaccine and um i think it's likely that you're going to see employers mandate that um i know one company here in the upstate's exploring the idea actually they've it's a well-known employer in the upstate that's actually going to go ahead and create an incentive and say hey we're not going to force you to take the vaccine but we will pay you x amount to go ahead and take it right because they feel like having people vaccinated will reduce the likelihood that in the short term they're spread within the facility and then long term that they have a healthier workforce so um i think this is gonna be an issue that's talked about a lot i think um you're likely to see that you're not gonna be able to fly on an airplane unless you have proof of vaccine certainly you're not gonna be able to go to europe i think it's safe to say you're not gonna be able to travel to some locations without having a proof of vaccine so that's gonna begin to sort of force that you know i'm old enough now this is dating me now but i can remember when the polio vaccine and there was skepticism around kids having to take the polio vaccine so i think with education you'll see that become less of an issue but but i will say it's a hot topic and companies are trying to figure out what the right thing to do is and i will say with european-based companies they're pro-vaccine and here in the upstate in particular we're pretty european so i think that's going to be an active topic we see you know uh i have read stories as a matter of fact not too long ago we did a video in our coping with covid ongoing series with the doctor from anmed health and that doctor confirmed with a lot of stories that i've been reading nationally that's saying that health care workers frontline workers are not taking this vaccine it's less than 50 percent right of what i've seen and you know my my concern is is that if health care workers are not taking it that it is going to lead to distrust uh in the in the public and that that is going to hurt us in the long run i agree i i agree with that i think i think the vaccine you know a lot of these issues are conflated with the politics of the time right so i think mask wearing vaccines so i think as time goes by i think some of that may settle um and i and i also think when people start getting the vaccine they're okay and they're traveling and they're comfortable you'll see that resistance of the vaccine sort of go away and in time it'll be fine but my advice to companies is you know to have a voluntary program and really educate and support and if you want to incentivize taking the vaccine that's fine but i think in the short term if i was a company if i was advising a company i i would probably resist a mandate just because i think that that just creates a a feeling of disconnectedness with the employer good info herb thank you before we leave though i want to ask you a couple more questions um in another story recently you were quoted in our paper we seem to quote you a lot that's good that is good and uh you were talking about workforce development and you said in that story and i want to make sure i get it right uh that whichever state makes a cohesive effort at workforce development making it more than a concept will be the state that takes off what does that mean what that mean you know the thing i love about my job is i get to watch multiple states workforce development and the thing that i always brag about with south carolina is we're not afraid of the topic of saying what do we do what do we do to go ahead and set ourselves up for the future so we can attract those businesses we want to see uh come into the state and that's a lot of different people that have to be in that discussion so how do we go in and talk with high school kids and make a good case for maybe a four-year school is not the right direction like a maintenance technician you go to greenville tech and you get a tier maintenance technician certification you know those men are women coming out first year they're making 80 90 000 a year whereas an engineer coming out of clemson maybe is starting at 65 or 70 right so i think we have to we have to not be afraid as a state of going out and really educating and giving people different different choices number one and then i think it's also having the tech schools which i love here in the state i feel like i think employers in the state are connected to the tech schools and the tech programs in developing programs that will help educate people so that when they start working they're qualified and ready to go because we want as a state to begin to attract higher technology industries which are higher paying right right we don't want to always attract you know 13 14 our employers we want to attract that 21 22 23 employer right that's paying a high wage um so i'm passionate about this and the other place this starts with and it's sort of our mission i'm gonna advertise hti a little bit here but our mission my mission over the next five years is to help begin coaching companies to understand if you want to go ahead and attract employees that can improve your bottom line you need to start looking at your employees as an asset and then what can you do culturally to change your culture internally to go ahead and have yourself become employer of choice so that people seek you out and say hey i want to work there because i've heard that's a good place to work for a number of things that isn't just about pay because right now what's happening with the low unemployment rate is people throwing a lot of money at pay rate but it's not always pay a lot of times it's just being heard or feeling like you know what your development looks like or that you're tied into the mission of the company um so yeah i'm pretty passionate about that and you should be that's a good segue into my last question and that is tough times crazy times in in the labor field if you are graduating from college right now what industry would you want to go into oh gosh that's a great question i think uh an area in south carolina that i'm really excited about it's a growth here is life sciences and i think we're we're still a little underequipped educationally for that um i know we work with one of our big customers charles river down in charleston you know essentially makes a drug that goes ahead and sterilizes iv fluid and i think south carolina uh is really we brought our threats into the upstate here recently so they're making joints and hips so i think life sciences and the support of life sciences is an industry that i would i would suggest people go into i think clemson's positioned well for that i think college of charleston is starting to look at you know areas of expertise in that lane so i would say life sciences is an area to look at not just from a healthcare standpoint but from a support of healthcare and then i would say the other area is logistics yes right i think logistics is fast growing and it's underutilized there are not enough people coming out of colleges or tech schools that have that experience of understanding planning transportation purchasing scheduling all those fields and those those fields have had the highest growth in salaries over the last 10 years of any manufacturing related field good information good advice herb thank you thanks for having me here folks that is herbdue he is the ceo and founder of hti human technologies incorporated and he was here talking about the employment outlook and we certainly appreciate him being here folks stick around on scbiz tv and see if there's anything else you might like to see we've got a couple more outlooks coming out fairly soon one on construction one on commercial real estate hope to see you again soon thank you [Music] you