Fargo .... Where jobs are

Help Wanted: Fargo Strains to Fill Jobs

Excerpt:

"It's not easy finding a candidate from the coasts who wants to move here," says David Dietz, vice president of Fargo staffing firm Preference Personnel Inc., which is trying to fill more than 80 positions. Three years ago a technology-sales vacancy—a typical Preference assignment to fill—would have had a maximum base salary of about $50,000; now that position will top out at $65,000, Mr. Dietz says.

Recruiting workers is a perennial struggle for the remote state. The low unemployment rate attracts lots of attention, but it's hard to convince many out-of-state residents to move there.

Most acutely needed: doctors, nurses and other health-care workers, as well as salespeople, from retail clerks to insurance agents. The western part of North Dakota, in the midst of an oil boom, is desperate for welders and engineers. Even truck drivers, who posted nearly 11% unemployment in 2010 nationally, are hard to find.

This year the state commerce department is hitting the road to find workers, scheduling job fairs in cities that tend to attract former Dakotans, starting with Minneapolis in May. The state expects between 40 and 50 employers and community organizations to attend and hopes to hold another fair in the fall.

Tech specialists are tough to hire, too. "We don't have people camped outside our office begging to work here," said Vern Dosch, chief executive of Mandan, N.D.-based National Information Solutions Cooperative. The 840-employee technology company plans to send representatives to the Minneapolis job fair.

Comment: For all the joking Minnesotans do about North Dakota (and we mock Wisconsin too (but I think it is really Packer envy!) and Iowa (the plain flatness), I don't think North Dakota would be a bad place to live. One of my co-workers has property and intends to retire there. I doubt it is really much colder than Minnesota!

North Dakota is hiring

North Dakota Asks, What Recession?

Excerpts:

North Dakota’s cheery circumstance — which economic analysts are quick to warn is showing clear signs that it, too, may be in jeopardy — can be explained by an odd collection of factors: a recent surge in oil production that catapulted the state to fifth-largest producer in the nation; a mostly strong year for farmers (agriculture is the state’s biggest business); and a conservative, steady, never-fancy culture that has nurtured fewer sudden booms of wealth like those seen elsewhere (“Our banks don’t do those goofy loans,” Mr. Theel said) and also fewer tumultuous slumps.

As it happens, one of the state’s biggest worries right now is precisely the reverse of most other states: North Dakota has about 13,000 unfilled jobs and is struggling to find people to take them.

...

“Our problem is that everybody thinks that it’s a cold, miserable place to live,” said Bob Stenehjem, a Republican and the State Senate’s majority leader. “They’re wrong, of course. But North Dakota is a pretty well-kept secret.”

With 635,867 residents, North Dakota is among the least populous states, and, in the past few years, more people have moved away, census figures show, than have moved here.

Katie Hasbargen, a spokeswoman for Microsoft’s Fargo campus, which is in the middle of a $70 million or so building expansion and is, even now, looking for a few additions to its work force (of more than 1,500), said false perceptions of the state are the problem when it comes to recruiting workers. “The movie,” Ms. Hasbargen said, referring to the 1996 Coen brothers’ film that bears this city’s name, “didn’t do us a lot of favors.”

Comment: But it is North Dakota! Re: "everybody thinks that it’s a cold, miserable place to live" - they're right!