Good help, lodging becoming harder to find

It’s no secret that finding and retaining employees in Sidney is a problem for many types of businesses.

Fast-food restaurants struggle to keep employees with so many job opening available. Businesses who require skilled workers have a hard time finding qualified individuals who live in the Sidney area. Most must recruit from outside areas.

Glenna Phelps-Aurich, director of the Cheyenne County Chamber of Commerce, believes that finding employees is the biggest challenge facing Sidney businesses.

Sid Johnston, the general manager at Floyd’s Automotive in Sidney, acknowledged that the company experiences difficulty recruiting workers. Floyd’s looks for employees with specific skills such as diesel technicians. Johnston’s biggest problem when recruiting workers to Sidney is finding those workers an affordable place to live, or even a place to live at all.

Sidney is not the only Nebraska town experiencing these problems, Phelps-Aurich said.

“A lot of other towns have housing shortages as well,” she said.

The Lodgepole Creek Apartment complex on Fort Sidney Road, which recently opened to renters, is a big help when directing possible newcomers to places to live, Phelps-Aurich said. The new Cabela’s housing development in east Sidney will also help to relieve the housing shortage, she said.

Sidney Regional Medical Center searches for employees across the country, said Cathy Arterburn, a representative of the hospital. Although SRMC typically looks for housekeepers and food workers within a 40 mile radius of Sidney, it hires nationwide for positions such as nurses aids and physician assistants. For some of the more skilled positions, workers typically aren’t willing to move to Sidney just for the job. Many of the hospital’s workers move here with a spouse and then learn of job openings at the hospital, Arterburn said.

“It’s a different job market,” said Adam Brodrero, general manager at Best Western in Sidney. “There are a lot of employers and not enough employees. You have to be pretty competitive with salaries.”

With “help wanted” signs in every window in town, it’s hard to entice employees to your business, said Best Western’s operations manager Peyton Hofer.

This problem is possibly exacerbated in Sidney because Cabela’s is constantly hiring, Phelps-Aurich said.