MARIETTA, Ga. — Editor's note: This story has been updated to better reflect the number of vacancies in Cobb County government.
Times remain tough in the job market if you’re an employer trying to fill many vacancies, including in local government.
Cobb County government, for example, currently has more job vacancies than it did a year ago, despite spending millions of dollars trying to fill them.
And the vacancies are, potentially, a matter of life and death for everyone.
Cobb County’s police, fire and sheriff’s office still have nearly 800 vacancies—and that’s about 20 more unfilled positions than last year.
“It’s just a challenging situation,” Cobb County Communications Director Ross Cavitt said, adding that the Cobb government, as a whole, is losing workers faster than the county can hire them.
According to county numbers provided by Cavitt, last year, out of 4,972 full-time positions in county government, there were 618 vacancies—12% of the full-time positions.
This year, with 5,297 full-time positions, there are even more vacancies, 794; that’s 15% of the full-time positions.
“It tells us we're in a very competitive job market,” Cavitt said, “even though we bumped up how much we pay our employees both on the minimum wage and throughout the ranks, it still has been difficult to get employees to fill those positions.”
It’s been difficult even after the county commission funded $22 million worth of raises and authorized aggressive bonus and incentive programs to recruit and keep employees.
“Especially in the public safety realm, we are picking from a very small potential group of employees," Cavitt said. "It's very competitive. Even with everything the board has done to raise the pay in public safety, we're still struggling to hire enough police officers and firefighters and sheriff's deputies to keep us fully staffed.”
Cavitt said another factor is that public employers such as Cobb County are, as always, competing with private sector employers--a competition that continues to grow more intense, as private sector employers are often able to offer more money to fill their vacancies.