Right people, right job: Johnson County sets strategy for recruiting and retaining quality employees
Nancy Warren, a food assistant for the Home-Delivered Meals Program, was the first applicant hired with the new career portal.
In a tight job market, attracting the best candidates to apply for your jobs – and then keeping them as employees – can be tough. But Johnson County launched a multi-step strategy for job recruitment and retention that’s producing results.
More people are getting hired, and fewer employees are leaving, according to Brent Christensen, interim Human Resources director.
“The ability to attract quality candidates is crucial to any organization, but it’s especially important for public service positions,” Christensen said. “We need people who are committed to providing Johnson County residents with the services they depend upon.”
Johnson County Government is the fourth-largest employer in the county, according to the County Economic Research Institute, with approximately 4,000 employees working in areas as diverse as libraries, housing, wastewater and mental health.
With so many county jobs available and with such low unemployment in Johnson County (just 1.8% in December 2023), Johnson County Government had to be purposeful in recruiting and retaining employees in an incredibly competitive market.
How did the county address this challenge?
1. Prioritizing staffing needs as Board goal.
The Johnson County Board of County Commissioners included staff needs as one of four Board priorities for 2023-2024. The action followed a report from human resources that the turnover rate in the county was at 16.01% for 2022.
“The number of employees leaving couples with the difficulty recruiting was cause for concern,” explained Tiffany Hentschel, deputy director for Human Resources. “We’re grateful to the board for focusing attention on the issue.”
2. Conducting a salary and benefits study.
In May 2022, the BOCC authorized a salary and benefits study to determine if the county was offering competitive compensation. The study used a mix of other local governments in the U.S. and other employers in the Kansas City area as a basis for comparison.
Results of the study indicated that the county’s salary grade structure was below market by an average of 6.1%.
3. Increasing salaries to be competitive.
Over the past few years, the county used several tools to address the labor crisis, including addressing compression, adding temporary recruitment and retention incentives and providing relief to specific areas of the organization where below-market pay was creating critical staff shortages.
In June 2023, the Board approved an organization-wide increase to county salaries based on the results of the study. For 2023, turnover rates dropped to 11.08%, a significant reduction.
4. Using a new career portal and onboarding system for applicants.
Johnson County Government’s new application system makes it easier for candidates to apply for positions and shortens the process from application to potential job offer.
The new system provides applicants with technical prompts and even sends text messages to remind them to complete their applications if they leave the system before the last step.
The feature was helpful for Nancy Warren, a food assistant for the Home-Delivered Meals Program offered by Johnson County Aging and Human Services. Warren was the first applicant hired with the new system, and though she thought she had completed her application, she received an alert that missing information was holding up her application.
Warren, 75, said since her retirement 16 years ago, she doesn’t use computers as much as she did when she was an elementary school teacher in Kansas City, Kansas. “Sometimes I wouldn’t see the submit button, so I thought I was done, and the system would tell me, ‘You still need to do this.’ So I’d go in and do it.”
The new portal has dramatically decreased the amount of time it takes to apply for a job from 35 minutes to three minutes.
If you’re interested in career opportunities with Johnson County Government, recently selected as one of Forbes Magazine’s Best Midsize Employers in America, visit jocogov.org/careers.