BY JIMMY LAWTON
North Country This Week

St. Lawrence County Administrator Ruth Doyle said the county is working on ideas to recruit and retain employees as it struggles to fill positions.

St. Lawrence County is not alone, employers throughout the nation have struggled to rebuild their ranks in the wake of COVID-19 layoffs and shutdowns.

The county has been actively looking for ways to address the problem.

Doyle said she put together a small group to discuss the issue in February.

Doyle noted that filling healthcare positions has been particularly hard.

She said the county needs to talk more about the issue and begin “strategizing a little bit better for attracting folks to come to work here.”

She mentioned the county’s student loan forgiveness program and said the county needs to continue to identify ideas to make it more attractive to work for the county.

Doyle said the county needs to get a better conversation going in the public about what the county jobs actually are and identify the benefits of working for the county.

“It's very unattractive when the advertisement for the job says it's provisional, you have to take a test, you have to score in the top three. There are all these reasons why this wouldn't be an ideal place to work and right now we know that we are behind already because it’s an employee market,” she said.

Doyle said she recently read about a new issue where people are accepting the positions, doing the paperwork then not showing up on the first day of work.

“So I think there is a lot happening, not just in St. Lawrence County Government, but certainly to provide our services we need to re-strategize how we do that,” she said.

The conversations took place May 16 at the Services Committee meeting.

At the meeting legislators agreed to create two new positions in the Office for the Aging and one new position in St. Lawrence County Department of Social Services.

Additionally they voted to fill four Youth Bureau internship positions and one position in SLC DSS.