DETROIT — When Jason Vazzano and Kurt Steckling started a new tech company in 1999, the best friends who tested disciplinary boundaries when they were in high school together wanted to create a company they'd love working at: a fun, fast-paced place with few rules.
Eighteen years later, their enterprise, Vectorform, has about 150 employees with headquarters in the downtown area of Detroit suburb Royal Oak, where workers zip up and down the halls on motorized skateboards, play with Legos to get their creative juices flowing and gather nearly every Tuesday to play board games.
Workers wear what they want to the office, including pajamas, bring in their dogs — and sometimes just work from home. They set their own schedule, as long as they meet their deadlines and put in 40 hours per week, and they have an unlimited number of sick days.
Still, as enticing as that workplace may seem, the labor market is so tight now that Vectorform — and many other companies — are wrestling with how to attract and keep employees.
Vectorform, among other things, creates virtual reality technology, develops software and invents digital products.
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The challenge, Vazzano and Steckling said, comes partly from the fact there a limited number of people who have the qualifications they need and partly because their competitors also are trying to hire — and hire away — the same workers.
To entice workers, experts say employers need to do more than offer better pay and benefits — they also need to map out clear career paths, provide professional development, show sincere appreciation and project a sense of purpose that goes beyond the job.
The latest forecast from CareerBuilder, an online employment website, shows that 45 percent of employers nationwide plan to hire full-time, permanent employees in the second quarter. That's the highest percentage for the quarter since 2007, up from 34 percent in the same period last year.
"It is the best — and highest number — in a decade," said Juli Smith, president of Smith Consulting Group in Jackson, Mich. "Clearly, that is speaking to what's going on in the marketplace and what I see as an executive recruiter and how incredibly tight the market is."
Companies in nearly every industry, she said, are struggling to recruit and retain talent.
While there has been a lot of buzz about how tech companies are setting up spaces with ping-pong tables and video games to lure and keep workers, Smith said those benefits don't appeal to every employee — nor are they appropriate for every kind of workplace.
"You aren't going to find that in a law office, in a civil engineering firm, in a manufacturing plant," she said.
To Smith, the most important thing a company can do is determine "what is important to your own people."
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"It's probably easier to keep the people that you have than it is to find people that you don't — and attract them when everyone else is competing for them," she added. "But, there's not one silver bullet for a strong retention plan. It has to be tailored and customized to your organization."
At ITC Holdings, an electrical transmission company based outside Detroit, recruiting begins with the internship.
In the last 10 years, as the labor market tightened, the competition for employees, including engineers and other tech professionals, has become much more competitive, said Matt Dills, ITC's chief human resources officer. ITC builds and maintains towers and wires that are used to transmit high-voltage electricity from power plants.
"Within our sector," Dills said, "we've faced labor challenges even when the labor market was quote-unquote a little more employer-friendly."
To put just how competitive it is now into perspective, he said, ITC annually visits about a half-dozen college campuses to recruit engineering interns and employees. At Michigan Tech, for example, ITC is competing with other companies from all over the world just for internships.
"This is back in January and February, and we're making offers to interns that early for the summer," he said. "It's also not unusual for companies — even in the middle of the internship process — to actually be making job offers, and that's something that's changed in the last couple of years."
To make its offers attractive to candidates and to keep employees, Dills said ITC offers competitive pay and benefits.
But, it also has been adding benefits employees want: free physical screenings, free financial planning advice and free legal services. It also has been doing more to promote efforts that help employees enjoy — and seek to protect — the environment.
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"We're an environmentally conscious company, and that's something that people are interested in these days," Dills said. "To our employees — and our prospective employees — that seems to be something that is appealing to them because of their interest now in environmental issues."
In fact, he said, job candidates often ask what the company does for the environment — and for the community.
Tina Kozak, the president of a Detroit public relations firm with about 25 employees, said workers, especially younger ones, want to know they are doing important work — and have a clear path for advancement.
"We are very heavy on young professionals," she said of her firm, Franco. "We're more than half what you'd classify as a millennial workforce. What we see what they want, in addition to being paid and have job stability, is purpose — to feel that purpose in their work."
To address this, she said, the firm encourages employees to join professional organizations and offers additional leadership training for people it has identified as high-performing and who may become managers in the firm within the next few years.
"We're helping them develop skills, which is obviously also helping the agency," she said. "Our people and our work are our most important products. But also, the focus on that helps us retain employees because they see we are investing in them, and they want to stay, they want to do great work — it's helping them visualize where they can be."
