With Montana’s unemployment rate at an amazingly low 2 percent, finding qualified workers for Helena employers is the biggest challenge facing the city’s employment agencies.

The agencies are also finding ways to change and grow in order to meet the demands of today’s dynamic marketplace.

According to A to Z Personnel owner Deena Korting, a large area of growth for her agency is in helping to provide homemaking services to the elderly. Korting said that her company is the only one in Helena to provide this service, where workers help their client with tasks such as light housekeeping, bill paying, meal preparation and transportation to and from appointments.

A to Z also offers a self-direct program through which the person who needs care in their home chooses their own caregiver. The agency handles the administrative part of the arrangement, including processing timecards and payroll.

Korting said her agency is currently in transition, looking to find what the areas of greatest need will be in the future as Helena continues to grow.

“It will be interesting to see Helena in the next ten years,” she said.

For now, because of Helena’s amazing building boom, Korting said one thing is certain: “If you move into this town and you’re a finish carpenter, you can have a job today.”

Express Personnel owner Lynne Johnson also sees the current growth in Helena as a very positive change, but is also similarly faced with the daunting challenge of finding qualified workers, especially those in the industrial and construction fields.

“That has been the biggest challenge over the past two summers,” Johnson said.

Johnson also said that she sees the trend continuing into the future.

“We have a lot of franchise box stores coming in all over the state,” she said. “As long as we have the growth, we will have the need.”

Johnson said her company is doing more qualifying of workers these days, verifying that candidates have the required skills to do the job. Express Personnel has 538 full staffing agencies throughout the United States and world-wide, including seven full service franchises in Montana.

According to Johnson, Express Personnel provides staffing services in the following areas: office services, industrial, professional, and technical.

“Express can help you increase your productivity and profitability,” Johnson said, “and our focus in Helena is finding the right workers for our clients.”

At Westaff and Personnel Plus, owner Jim Nys has also seen the stagnation in the labor force as compared with the growing need for workers.

“If you go around town, the most common sign you’ll see these days is, “Now Hiring,” Nys said. According to Nys, there is still a surplus in some service-sector positions, but there is a large shortage of skilled IT and other specialized workers.

Nys heads both Westaff and Personnel Plus, two companies that focus on different aspects of the employment industry. Westaff is a temp agency, which helps employers who have a temporary need for extra staff, and Personnel Plus is a consulting firm which helps businesses recruit quality candidates.

Nys said that employers are now having to pay attention to a new corporate culture in which they seek to make their workplace what Nys called, “an employer of choice,” in order to retain qualified workers. When conducting training sessions, Nys said the most popular topic among employers used to be how to avoid trouble when firing workers. The most popular topic these days is how to keep good employees.

In this new climate, Personnel Plus also works with employers to “market” their open positions by touting the high quality of life and relatively low cost of living in Montana to out-of-state job hunters.

Another agency working to attract quality workers to Montana is Helena Job Service. According to regional manager Al Maurillo, a reality of today’s job market is that workers are willing to relocate to different parts of the country. Because of this, the Job Service works with Montana employers and the Department of Commerce to attract quality employees to the state.

Job Service also helps Montana workers with an incumbent worker training program. This program helps workers who already have a job to increase their marketability, enabling them to increase their skill set and move up from an entry-level position. According to Maurillo, this can also be an opportunity for an employer to increase their employees’ skills, enabling them to be more competitive as we move toward an increasingly global economy.

“Our agency is changing from a labor exchange model to a case management model where we are more focused on career counseling,” Maurillo said.

According to Maurillo, while there is a new industry developing in the energy field in Montana, there is a clear shortage of workers, and as the Baby Boomer generation begins to move out of the work force, the problem will grow. To help address this need, Job Service plans to begin working with the vocational schools to help anticipate where there will be shortages in the work force, and to train workers in advance to replace workers who are moving out of the work force.

Job Service is also constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency and to, “give the Montana taxpayer more bang for their buck.” To this end, Montana Job Service recently restructured into five regions statewide. Region 2 includes the Helena area along with Butte, Anaconda, Dillon and Bozeman.

One goal of the restructuring is for the Job Service offices to be able to share resources and information more efficiently between offices within a region and statewide. Under the new system, Job Service also plans to work closely with education and business in order to position Montana to be a leader in developing industries.