Adam Knapp: We hope we’re delivering something that we should have all had and wished we had. But goodness, if we don’t do it for this generation and the next generation, well we’re not leaving it a better place, right? So the hope is that we’re putting in place things that should exist, in many cases used to exist, but there was a turn away from vocational education.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s the voice of Adam Knapp, president and CEO of the Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce. Talent strategies in Baton Rouge support people in all phases of life and career while also creating a pipeline for local in demand jobs. Today Adam joins us from a community hitting all the right notes when it comes to talent. Stick around for ideas you might be able to implement in your city. I’m Amanda Ellis and you’re listening to Inside America’s Best Cities, a podcast for chambers, economic development and talent attraction professionals on how to make your community even better. To learn more about this podcast visit livabilitymedia.com. And with that, let’s jump in. Welcome, Adam. Thanks so much for joining us today. We’re super excited to learn more about Baton Rouge and some of the talent recruitment efforts that you all are engaged in. Thanks for being here.

 

Adam Knapp: I’m thrilled to do it. Thanks for having me, Amanda.

 

Amanda Ellis: Adam, to set the stage a little bit here, can you just share a bit about what are some of your favorite things about Baton Rouge as a business community?

 

Adam Knapp: Well, as a person that lives here as much as is a business community, I think we think about it a lot in terms of what attracts the employees, the talent of our companies, to move to a place, and so we live a lot in that space when we talk to our companies. And we hear from them that the folks that move here that are not from here or move back, who maybe went to university or high school here or have married somebody who’s from here that brings them here, they identify the climate and the green space kind of off the top of the list as some of the most attractive things they love about it. So we hear that a bunch for those especially who love the outdoors, biking, hiking, fishing, all things outdoors. I lived in Chicago for a while and always felt like other than going to play golf I didn’t have a whole lot of other places I could go out. I’m not trying to dis on… I love Chicago, but it was just interesting that it was how accessible and easy it is to get to the green space of the community. Our park system just got ranked in some national competition of park systems as the number one park system in the US, which is really an amazing testament for a mid-size city, to be able to have a high quality kind of system like that available to their community. So I’d say that’s probably one of my favorite things that we hear from the business community that they love about Baton Rouge.

 

Amanda Ellis: How long have you been there, Adam?

 

Adam Knapp: 15 years. I moved here 21 years ago actually, back in 2002, and just loved the place. Met my wife here. Just been a great community to raise a family in.

 

Amanda Ellis: Do you have roots there or what brought you there?

 

Adam Knapp: I do. I was from a little town in southwest Louisiana called Lake Charles, which is closer to Texas, and went away for college, worked away for a long time, and then kind of brought me back to come in and work in state government economic development policy, which is… What drew me back was a chance to work at a kind of a governor’s office environment, which is really special.

 

Amanda Ellis: I got to attend a press trip to Baton Rouge about a year ago. I really liked Baton Rouge. There was so much diverse stuff to do, and I think about it all the time, and I’m not just like… I’ve been on quite a few trips like that and I do feel like that was one that stood out to me as just having its own really unique culture. And we did a day trip to St. Francisville. I loved it. I really had a good time. I was there for the Blues Fest thing last year.

 

Adam Knapp: Well, it’s also cool since you mentioned Blues Fest, I think people know this intuitively if they’ve been in capital cities before, but capital cities with a large business and manufacturing community and research universities, those places have just amazing culture. And I think you could almost map out communities across the country, just saying I want to go visit those places just because I think it’s going to be interesting to find out how that has developed their place, and then you can kind of think of them kind of intuitively. But it’s a really unique thing to find in the country. Those communities have this really smart base of folks, and a lot of diversity of thought and backgrounds of places they’re from, and then they also I think have a lot of intentionality of how they think about the place they live. So the community grows up around those thought patterns of their university culture or their capital city culture, and then add to that this kind of big base of manufacturing that brings in people from all over the world. They’re fascinating places.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s really interesting. I’ve never heard anyone put it quite that way before, but that makes a lot of sense.

 

Adam Knapp: I mean, if you think about Madison, Wisconsin, you think about Austin, it’s fascinating to see how those cultures develop in those places with those unique combinations.\

 

Amanda Ellis: So of course we’ve been kind of all over the board here, but what we’re here to talk about today is some of the talent recruitment, retention, attraction efforts going on in Baton Rouge and some things that you are doing really well. So before we get into that in more detail, can you talk about what are the in-demand careers in your community right now? What’s the pipeline you’re working toward filling with these strategies?

 

Adam Knapp: The most challenging ones, I think they’re important ones that we’re trying to address, have been in healthcare and kind of relatedly in life sciences, in the technology sector, and then broadly across construction and manufacturing, which kind of have a plethora of craft skill needs that we look to help fill. And then kind of everywhere, but especially here, you see a lot of needs in logistics and transportation as a sector. Then Baton Rouge, because it’s a capital city, has a lot of legal, accounting, finance, banking, and a broad base of small businesses as back office services. So I’d say those are the big categories we see as in-demand sectors, and we work closely with our education partners of around that frame of five big broad categories.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. That’s an extremely diverse group of careers.

 

Adam Knapp: It is, and it’s like, well, those are all very different, so how does this work?

 

Amanda Ellis: You have sort of a three prong approach, I gather, really targeting talent at every level. So you have programs that target high schoolers, college students and grownups who aren’t necessarily in school or haven’t been for a while. So I’d like to talk through each of those. Would you say that’s a pretty accurate way of describing it?

 

Adam Knapp: So it’s really three, and we probably will have expand to be four by the end of this year. We’re actually in the middle of launching a fourth, so I’ll touch on a fourth.

 

Amanda Ellis: Perfect. Okay. Well can you kick us off by talking about your Talent Action Collaborative for K through 12 students?

 

Adam Knapp: Our Talent Action Collaborative grew out of our strategic planning work in 2021 and saw that we were not doing what a lot of our counterparts in regional economic development work or chambers are doing across the country to help really tightly coordinate the in-demand sectors of their community with education. So we worked hard to build a group, it’s probably 60 different businesses today and we keep growing it, where we’ve kind of curated and recruited a group of companies that are in each of those sectors that I mentioned a minute ago, like healthcare and construction and manufacturing. Let’s say there’s 10 to 20 companies that we pulled together in those groups, and they work on a few things when they meet. So each month or each other month they come together and they’ll think about the soft skill needs of their industry, the hard skill needs of their industry from a education standpoint, and then they’ll look at the career pathways on how students from especially high school, but increasingly middle school, all the way through two year schools and then four year schools, how they sort of learn the skills needed to enter those industries. And the goal first for our work with Talent Action Collaborative has been to help our high schools especially learn how to expose kids to careers, make sure that the career-oriented education that they are getting is aligned to the things that the industry say should be taught within those categories of industries, and then ideally we’re going to have a path into a workplace experience by the time they’re a senior in high school. So the project we’ve been doing is to help students not only learn the right content while they’re in any kind of career oriented education work or dual enrollment programming at high schools, and then tracking into ideally a senior year at workplace experience that will offer them a paid exposure to something in healthcare or something in technology. And if they want to go straight into the workforce instead of going on to a two year degree or a four year degree, they could have that option because they’ve already gotten some real world experience, or they can start working and then that helps them pay for their further educational journey. And that’s where this has all been focused, in making it very practical and real that students learn their choices. What we see in the data is, at least in Baton Rouge and in Louisiana, around 50% of kids coming out of high school go on to a four year degree right away. The other 50%, you’re hoping to pick them up in some career education, dual enrollment or workplace experience learning that they’re going to have some thought about where they’re going with their careers if they’re not going straight to a four year degree. And that’s really what the Talent Action Collaborative has been working on.

 

Amanda Ellis: When I hear about this stuff I always think I wish more of this had existed when I was a high school student.

 

Adam Knapp: Well, I will say partly what gets us excited is we hope we’re delivering something that we should have all had and wished we had. But goodness, if we don’t do it for this generation or the next generation, well we’re not leaving it a better place. So the hope is that we’re putting in place things that should exist, in many cases used to exist, but there was a turn array from vocational education.

 

Amanda Ellis: And I just love letting people dabble in what they might want to do at a little bit younger age. I feel like I had so much confusion around what I wanted to do, but it was because, at least for me, I didn’t understand very many careers too well because you don’t have a lot of work experience when you’re 17, 18.

 

Adam Knapp: It’s funny you use the word dabble. That is exactly the word that one of our high school principals uses when he talks about career exposure. And he has 17 different categories of jobs you can learn while you’re there, including running a pizza shop after hours that they have on school site that they actually sell pizza to the community after 3:00 and the kids make everything. They’ve got… The Spirit Store is all tee-shirts and gear made by the students and then sold by the students.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s awesome.

 

Adam Knapp: They’ve got another group of kids who are running a coffee shop. All the support services for their basketball arena is run by students. They’ve got this fascinating kind of entrepreneurial climate, but he calls it dabbling. He wants everybody to try a little bit of something while they’re in high school.

 

Amanda Ellis: So is the pizza good?

 

Adam Knapp: It’s a Papa John’s. They got a franchise of Papa John’s for the school, which is incredibly clever, because they keep all the revenue they make after paying their franchise fees. So they basically are also kind of supplementing revenue to the school to be able to do other things that help promote the career education of the school. They also have a credit union branch that the students operate at the school, so they can go straight into school for banking if they want to right out of that program. It has an adult that’s in there that’s also running the branch, but the adult is really overseeing the students who are part of the program. It’s very creative.

 

Amanda Ellis: So is this like one larger public school that’s kind of doing this?

 

Adam Knapp: So Livingston Parish, which is a suburb of Baton Rouge, has a number of high schools that do this. There’s one particular high school that’s really kind of been for over a decade really kind of aggressively going after this space, and each year it seems like that school adds another component to it. They’ve got medical. They’ve got folks doing broadcasting and podcasting. They’ve got another one that kids are learning how to fly and repair drones. It’s just fascinating to watch. And they also have what you’d expect in automotive, welding, electrical, carpentry. So they’ve got some of the core craft skills, but they’ve got all these other kind of new sectors coming along as well.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s awesome. It’s so valuable to be able to explore your interests in a lower pressure way. By the time you get to college, you’re like if you start doing something and don’t like it you have to change your major, you might have to go to school longer. It’s way more pressure, so I love just being able to, again, dabble. So at the college level part of what you’re doing, I know that you all have been making as a community a more dedicated effort to utilize the Handshake platform effectively, so that… And I remember using this when I was in school, but for listeners who may not know, can you just kind of share what that is and what you all are doing with it that’s unique?

 

Adam Knapp: So Handshake, for those who don’t know, if you search in the app store, your favorite app store on your phone, you’ll find that job search for college students, this is the number one app for that purpose. It’s paid for by career services offices and then it’s free to the student. And most importantly for me, it’s free to the employers to sign up and use it for recruitment. And that if you’re hearing this, you can do this anywhere in the country. It’s available across the US, and nearly every four year school… Again, it’s kind of amazing, is already a user of Handshake. They submit their student information and the students automatically have profiles, and then employers can go create profiles, and you essentially can toggle on and off that you want to recruit from any given university. As you post jobs on Handshake it presents those internships or those jobs to students at the colleges that each business wants them to be visible to. And Baton Rouge what we’ve been doing is promoting that through our own advertising as an organization. We spend a lot of in-kind media that we get donated to us on advertising in the Handshake platform, and what we’re trying to do is tell employers how important it is that they activate and create handshake profiles. If they want to recruit students out of our universities, not just in the Baton Rouge area, from anywhere, but especially in Louisiana, we want them to learn how this tool works. The more of them that create profiles and then place internships on the Handshake platform, the more likely it is that a student is going to find something here rather than another state to do during their summer. Our hope is that if they’re from somewhere else but they’re here for university, we want them to stay for their internship during the summer. That also increases the likelihood that they stay in Louisiana and Baton Rouge after graduation, that they’ve already formed a relationship with an employer that hopefully is going to be one that’s attractive to their future career development. And our universities, as a counterpart in this partnership, have said we’re going to promote it like crazy. We’re going to kind of Gamify this thing so deans feel like 72% of my students have their Handshake profile activated and the other dean can feel embarrassed that they’re only at 69% or whatever. So it’s fun to create this pressure on them to really motivate their students to use the platform so that it’s more likely they’re all understanding that education is a pathway to a career, and we want them to learn how to use this platform, and if we increasingly intentional that there’s more local internships posted on there they’ll also earn money in these jobs while they’re making their way through college. And then, if nothing else, that also gives them a way to search for a job once they graduate. So we have 60,000 roughly students in higher education in the Baton Rouge area in a community of about 850,000 people, so it’s so important for us to make sure that our employers know how to recruit from that population of students, and in times of old it was hard to do. Your dean might have told you somewhere to go call for an application, or somebody in student affairs or career services might have told you what jobs are good for somebody finishing with a degree like what you earned. This way you don’t have to go call on a dean or call anybody. We hope to kind of bypass that, and as Handshake says, they’re trying to democratize access to careers coming out of college.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. I remember the Handshake thing being pushed a lot when I was in school, but kind of under-utilized.

 

Adam Knapp: Exactly. We’re also creating more events this year around specific industries, not only to promote Handshake, but also bringing employers into the fold at our campuses.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. It’s so interesting how things have shifted in the last, I don’t know, more than a decade I guess. It used to be so tough for college students just to find things and it was like no one wanted to deal with college students, no one wanted to deal with someone who didn’t have experience, and you were just kind of begging someone to give… I don’t know when your college years were, but you were just begging someone to give you a chance. It’s interesting how the narrative has shifted, and I guess that’s just from the base of employees shifting and it being just more need and employers having to engage a little bit more to find the right people. But isn’t it interesting how that’s shifted?

 

Adam Knapp: It’s fascinating. My first summer job was pumping gas on a boat dock on a lake. It was not glamorous by any means, nor do I think I learned any life skills doing it.

 

Amanda Ellis: You really want to get new life skills.

 

Adam Knapp: I don’t know.

 

Amanda Ellis: You can’t think of a single-

 

Adam Knapp: Wear suntan lotion. I don’t know.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s a good one.

 

Adam Knapp: The amazing thing is I think students, if they choose to do so, have a lot more access to thinking about their career progression. Hopefully they will have attained some of that while they’re in high school, but also when they’re in school they have a lot more access to say, I’m studying this, I’m majoring this. Is there anything here in this community that offers me a way to get into a job like that, and I don’t want to wait for someone who knows somebody to tell me what about that job opportunity? I can find it by on my own.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. I’m really glad it’s changing. I can remember summers in college just trying so hard to find something where I could make some money and also get some relevant experience, and it was not easy at all.

 

Adam Knapp: So true.

 

Amanda Ellis: So I’m glad to see that that might be shifting a little bit.

 

Adam Knapp: The only thing I think that is impressive about it is jobs have often been who you know, or how you grew up, or the community around which you learned. Maybe your parents were doctors or nurses or lawyers, you learned that universe, but you didn’t know everything else that was out there. And that is true in general, but it’s also kind of split based on the income level of the family or the race background that you might not have known or been told that you can do these other things. And so what’s really cool about where we are, and hopefully getting better every day, is that this sort of makes that access available for everyone regardless of where you grew up or what network you grew up in.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Or again, just not understanding the complexity of a lot of different careers because you didn’t necessarily have a front row seat to it if it wasn’t what your parents did.

 

Adam Knapp: Right. Exactly.

 

Amanda Ellis: I remember… Neither of my parents were office workers, so I remember being like, what does that even mean? Something like what I do now, I just remember having a complete lack of understanding of what you actually would do all day.

 

Adam Knapp: That’s right. We have a high school student who… This is a different… This is a private school that offers that students can go work at an employer’s office all year. And so once a week, twice a week, the student comes by our office and helps out in our accounting staff. And it’s been so funny to watch him because he would come in mostly exhausted, bored out of his mind because we’re shoved him in our accounting office, and he came up to us not too long ago and said, “A year ago when I started here I thought this was the most boring place ever, and now I understand what it means to work in an environment, to get to know all the colleagues in the office.” Everybody kind of loves this guy coming around the office. And he kind of decided I think I’m going to go on to a four year degree and major in accounting. That kind of blew us away, that now he understands what it is, and he would never have thought of doing it, but now he sees what it is and he’s like this is pretty neat. I can do this.

 

Amanda Ellis: That third prong of your all talent attraction approach, I know you have BR Works, you’re regional jobs portal that’s fairly new I think. So I’d love to hear a little more about that, and then if you want to go into the newer fourth prong that you mentioned earlier as well?

 

Adam Knapp: Yeah. So BR Works is kind of a COVID baby we had that’s growing up. The project in COVID was that employers wanted to find workers. They begged us to create just a listing of open positions that we’d promote like crazy to media platforms just to try to tell workers to go look for… These places are hiring if you’re trying to get back into the workforce and were laid off. We called it BR Works, but it was really like Yahoo circa 1995. It was just a list of links-

 

Amanda Ellis: What a flattering description of what you created.

 

Adam Knapp: That’s right. So that little COVID baby, which was Yahoo 1995, grew up. We said we wanted was something that was automated, HR didn’t have to post jobs to it in another platform. We wanted something that made it so that job seekers could also use a skills-based search feature, upload their resume, it picks out what skills they’ve learned, and then it presents them with jobs that are matched to what their resume says they have learned or are good at and what experiences they’ve had. And so BR Works is powered by a software platform from a company called Light Cast. It just that. So br.works is the website, and you can upload your resume, or we just go on and fill out a survey and it kind of tells you a skills profile of you as a worker. And then it’ll search all the open positions that are posted and listed for Baton Rouge on national HR platforms. And so we’ve got let’s say around 25,000 open positions in the Baton Rouge area. I’m off by some number, but I can’t… It’s close. So a job seeker will have the ability to get a smart way to search through those positions, which is not something that in an Indeed or some of these national sites can’t do, but it’s going to only present you the open positions that are across the nine parish area, and so you’re going to get something very localized, and it’s going to have these clever features that you can turn on and off those skills that you want it to search or prioritize searching with. And not only does it use your resume, you can go and add other ones. It’s kind of like using Spotify. If you’re thinking about things you love and music you can take on or off things that you want it to show you in your library of music. It’s the same thing for skills when you’re searching for a job. And then the other thing we added to it a little bit after launch was we wanted to offer a feature of up-skilling. So if you wanted to add some skills to your background and you went and took a class at a community college or a four year school that you wanted to learn negotiation, you wanted to be able to add that to your list of skills in business say, after you took the class you can add it, but if you didn’t know where to go take the class it’ll actually guide you to the open training resources that are out there across the Baton Rouge area or in virtual online learning classes. So you can actually navigate from the job search portion of the site over to this up-skilling search feature, and it’ll help you identify the classes or courses that most match to your skillsets that you may not have yet. They can show you you can take this class. It takes about 12 hours or whatever, and go and add this additional trait to your skillset, and here’s where you register for it. So it’s trying to do both things, be a wizard for searching for up-skilling classes as well as a wizard into the job search world. Our ultimate goal we want to be able to do is a lot more national recruiting as well. So someone who’s not from Louisiana, not from Baton Rouge, wants to come and search for a job in Baton Rouge, we wanted to be able to not only do advertising to promote Baton Rouge, but then direct them to job listings, so we had to build a platform for a jobs portal in order to go out and do national marketing. So the strategy which we’re unfolding this year, which we got a large grant last year to fund, is to now go out and do national marketing to tell the story of the quality of life in Baton Rouge through social media, through kind of targeted marketing, and then directing those stories to those that might be looking for jobs.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yes, that storytelling piece is so important, and I’m a little bit biased, but you have to have the right color around your community to get people to understand why it’s special when there’s so many places they could pick from.

 

Adam Knapp: So these four prongs, as we kind of run through it, I mean you think about the pipeline of talent from high school, if we have 4,000 kids a year who are seniors in our high schools, we want to try to direct those seniors who may not be going on to a four year degree into jobs. We have this strategy to try to help the 60,000 students or who are in higher education, how to do job search and placement into internships using Handshake. And then we want to do a lot more national recruiting, promoting job opportunities to the local adult population, but also trying to recruit folks from out of the Baton Rouge area into the open opportunities that are here. The data on this is kind of crazy, but during most of this kind of two year period after COVID, or however long we want to say this has been, today we have about 25,000 posted positions that we see on BR Works, but there are only about a little over 10,000 people who are unemployed today in Baton Rouge and looking for work. So even if every one of those folks who are unemployed found one of the jobs on BR Works, we still have a significant job shortage or employment shortage, so we have to be looking at all these other creative sources of how to direct folks into the workforce to try to meet the needs that employers have.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Well, I don’t think you could have a more well-rounded approach than you do.

 

Adam Knapp: Well that’s a very nice compliment.

 

Amanda Ellis: What advice would you give to someone new to being responsible for talent attraction in their community or has just had this added to their job description as something to work on?

 

Adam Knapp: I think building meaningful relationships and connections between employers and education partners is essential. I’d say the second thing is people don’t realize how helpful Handshake is for tools for job search, so what we try to do is promote that folks think about Handshake even if they’re not in a higher education community, that there’s ways to help employers learn how to recruit workers from universities even if that university isn’t in your community because it’s free. It’s already being paid for. All you have to do is really teach employers how to post and search through it.

 

Amanda Ellis: The high school that you talked about at the beginning that was doing so many cool things, what’s the name of that school in case people want to read up on it more?

 

Adam Knapp: Yeah. Sure. It’s called Walker High School in Livingston Parish. Happy to make connections if anybody wants to track us down.

 

Amanda Ellis: Well, I always close out our interviews by asking if you had to pick one bucket list item that someone visiting Baton Rouge should be sure to do, what would you say?

 

Adam Knapp: Oh my gosh, that is a great question. This is purely personal. It’s not even exactly a local Baton Rouge example, but there’s a basin called the Atchafalaya Basin that’s between Lafayette and Baton Rouge. You can actually rent a houseboat and it gets towed out into this waterway, and they’ll tie up that boat for a weekend, a week, or even two weeks, and you can just have your little Airbnb on the bayou basically. They give you a dinghy to motor back to refresh your beer stock, and then you can hang out in quiet solitude in an Atchafalaya houseboat. It is awesome. If anybody wants a really different kind of vacation, it’s fun. You can fish, you get to spend a lot of time playing cards with friends, and then they’ll give you the dinghy that you can go run back and forth to the dock. And the dock is great because it has Cajun music and Zydeco music that’s playing there through most weekends. So you can go back to the shore, go hang out, listen to music, dance, whatever you want to do, and then take your little dinghy back into the swamp to your houseboat. Or you can just stay secluded, bring your food and stay for the weekend, and fish and enjoy the quiet of the swamp. You can see the shoreline, but you really don’t see any other people unless they happen to wander by your little corner or the bayou.

 

Amanda Ellis: That is fascinating. You gave a really different answer, so good job. Definitely no one has talked about that before.

 

Adam Knapp: I don’t think anyone ever will too.

 

Amanda Ellis: Well, Adam, thank you so much. That was a lot of great swamp info and talent attraction info. Like I said, I really love what you all are doing and really appreciate you coming on to share some of it.

 

Adam Knapp: Thanks for having me on.

 

Amanda Ellis: Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast, where we take you Inside America’s Best Cities. At Livability we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-sized cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode please follow, rate and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. Have an idea for an upcoming episode? Email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability I’m Amanda Ellis, sharing the stories of America’s Most promising places.