With drive-thru career fair, DMV tries to fill dozens of empty jobs in Rocky Mount
More than 300 people will drive through the Division of Motor Vehicles headquarters parking lot here on Tuesday, resumes in hand, to find out if they’d be a good fit to work for the agency.
The drive-thru career fair, designed with the coronavirus pandemic in mind, is one strategy DMV is using to try to fill dozens of jobs that have come open because of the department’s move from Raleigh to Rocky Mount in December.
DMV has hired at least 40 people to work in its headquarters since Jan. 1, said commissioner Torre Jessup. But that still leaves about 85 vacancies, or about 18% of the 472 jobs at the complex DMV leases on North Church Street.
“We’ve seen a significant number of people who decided the commute is not for them,” Jessup said. “There is attrition related to the move, and we anticipated that.”
The backlog in open jobs was exacerbated by a hiring freeze last summer related to financial problems at the N.C. Department of Transportation. NCDOT has erased its budget shortfall since then, and hiring resumed last fall.
What’s unknown is how many DMV employees who live in the Triangle have remained with the agency because the coronavirus pandemic has allowed them to work from home. About 300 headquarters employees are working from home at least part-time during the pandemic, and Jessup says he doesn’t know how many might decide to leave when and if they’re forced to make the 120-mile or so round-trip commute each day.
“We’re trying to figure out if there’s some long-term telework policy that we put into place. That could be a retention tool,” he said. “But I suspect that we will see some people, just because they have to travel one day to Rocky Mount, who may find their way to another opportunity.”
DMV did not seek to leave its longtime headquarters complex on New Bern Avenue, east of downtown Raleigh. But the buildings had problems with asbestos and fire safety that the State Construction Office and the Department of Insurance determined were too expensive to fix.
The General Assembly passed legislation that directed DMV to vacate its offices by the fall of 2020, and to seek proposals to lease new offices in Wake or surrounding counties. Nash County, where the Rocky Mount site is located, just qualified because it touches Wake near Zebulon.
The state received a dozen lease proposals, all of them in Wake County or Research Triangle Park except the one in Rocky Mount. The rent for that property was the cheapest, and DMV officials said they felt obligated under state law to choose the lowest bidder that met its space needs.
The State Employees Association of North Carolina objected to the move on behalf of workers who wouldn’t want to move or commute from the Triangle to Rocky Mount. People with children, elderly parents and other obligations in the Raleigh area don’t want to go so far from home to work, said Suzanne Beasley, the association’s director of government relations.
“The drive from Raleigh to Rocky Mount isn’t exactly a hop, skip and a jump,” Beasley said. “To just pick up and move your whole work life more than an hour down the road and then try to get children back and forth to school and parents to doctors visits — it’s a whole different level of complications that they obviously weren’t expecting when they took the job.”
“A lot of them found other jobs where they could stay in their home area,” she said.
A labor market eager for employers
Rocky Mount had a 7.9% unemployment rate in December, the second highest among the state’s metro areas, after Fayetteville. DMV has worked with local economic development groups, the chamber of commerce, community colleges and local jobs centers to identify good candidates for administrative and back-office jobs at its headquarters.
“I’m really pleased with the community response,” Jessup said. “That is probably DMV’s most valuable asset in terms of helping us deal with the attrition that we knew we were going to have with this move.”
Meanwhile, DMV has been using temporary workers to help get the work done, because they’re faster to put in place while the agency looks for permanent hires. Some of those temps are expected to move into full-time jobs, Jessup said.
The move to Rocky Mount came at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic had changed the way DMV does business. To curb spread of the coronavirus, the agency hasn’t taken walk-in customers in nearly a year and has offered limited road tests for drivers seeking licenses. A private company might have delayed moving its headquarters until the pandemic was over, Jessup said, but DMV was obligated by law to get it done.
With the turnover in employees, Jessup says, DMV is losing people with significant experience and knowledge. But it’s also a chance to changes things for the better, he said.
“We’re trying to improve the way that we do things in the back office, creating efficiencies in the back office and a whole new culture,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity to do that right now.”
There are no more available slots for Tuesday’s drive-thru career fair at DMV. For information about DMV job openings at the headquarters and elsewhere, go to bit.ly/3pGWGJU.
This story was originally published February 22, 2021 at 8:00 AM with the headline "With drive-thru career fair, DMV tries to fill dozens of empty jobs in Rocky Mount."
