Drew Repp: Talent attraction really begins with talent retention. Most folks who have spent any amount of time in economic development will tell you that most of a community’s job growth comes from existing businesses. And so while attracting businesses is great, most of the growth is gonna come from those businesses that are already there. And I think the same is in many ways, gonna end up being true with talent, that the talent you already have, fostering that talent, developing it and retaining it is going to be really important. That’s not to say that talent attraction isn’t important and isn’t something that can’t be done, but always that thing of paying attention to your backyard.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s the voice of Drew Repp, content manager at Lightcast, sharing data informed tips for telling your community’s story. In this episode, Drew reviews the relevant labor market trends of 2022, plus how they can inform your work as a community spokesperson and the many other hats that you wear. 

 

My name’s Amanda Ellis, and you’re listening to Livability: Inside America’s Best Cities, a brand new podcast for chamber, economic development and town attraction professionals. We bring you expert insights on how your community can be a better place to live, work, and play. To learn more about this podcast, visit livabilitymedia.com, where you can also sign up for Livability’s monthly Let’s Talk Talent, talent attraction newsletter. Now let’s jump in.

 

Well Drew, first of all, thank you so much for joining us today on the Liverbility podcast. So the focus of today’s conversation is mainly how data ties into storytelling. For economic developers, marketing their community by telling its story is a big part of their jobs. So we’re super excited to hear from you on how to use metrics to help identify your community’s advantages and be more effective with your marketing. To get us started, I bet many of our listeners already know a bit about Lightcast, but can you tell us a bit about what you all do just to kick off?

 

Drew Repp: Yeah, absolutely. So Lightcast is a global labor market analytics firm, and we help communities, businesses and learning providers make informed decisions using data. So to do this, we combine a host of different data sources to really try and provide a comprehensive view of a given labor market, whether that’s an MSA or a region or a state and to do that, we pull data from lots of different places. A lot of it’s built on our core LMIs, we aggregate census and BLS data. We also layer that with job posting data profile analytics, and then we also have compensation data. Then over the last number of years, we’ve also been really focused on skills data, just as a common language that those three entities use businesses, people and communities and educators to communicate that’s the common language that we’re seeing out there.

 

So we take all that and we then deliver it in various software platforms and tools. We do custom consulting and then also a lot of research and thought leadership work as well. We now have two co headquarters in Moscow, Idaho, and Boston. We’re continuing to grow globally. I think we’re active in around 30 countries and starting to move into more. Obviously there’re some nuances as labor market data looks different in different places around the world, but we’re moving more globally, have offices in the UK, Italy, New Zealand and India I believe, are global locations as well. So it’s Lightcast in a nutshell.

 

Amanda Ellis: Drew, I know that you all have recently completed a rebrand. You were formerly Emsi Burning Glass and now you’re Lightcast. So big name change, big rebrand, do you want to share anything about the significance of the name, how you all chose that? Any other big changes with the branding?

 

Drew Repp: You nailed it there. Over about the last year have been Emsi Burning Glass. So about a year and a half ago, Emsi merged with Burning Glass and so we’ve had Emsi Burning glass for the last year and we’ve been doing just all sorts of great things during that time, as far as just bringing our data together, updating our methodologies. But definitely, we were at a point where we needed to have a name that really captured where we’re heading. So we are now Lightcast and really that’s all about just continuing to provide insights and vision for communities into the labor market. It’s becoming increasingly complex. It’s changing all the time and so we want to really shed as much light on what’s going on so that communities can make the best decisions moving forward. We’re very excited. We’re very excited to have Lightcast and not quite such a long name.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Emsi Burning Glass is a bit of a mouthful and if you haven’t heard of the company before, you’re like, what did they say?

 

Drew Repp: Yeah, exactly. So Lightcast is great. We’re excited about it.

 

Amanda Ellis: It’s very cool. So you bring a lot of perspective with your background Drew, I know you worked in economic development yourself in Spokane Washington prior to joining the team at Lightcast. So you’ve been on multiple sides of the table, really. What is the most important data that you think economic developers and talent attraction professionals should be familiar with and how do they know which of those metrics to be focusing on when they’re telling their story, whether it’s to businesses or talent.

 

Drew Repp: You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot as obviously a lot of communities have been. With talent attraction. I’m becoming more of the mindset that. Talent attraction really begins with talent retention. I think talent attraction is really just taking a page from what economic developers have traditionally done with business attraction and retention and that most folks who have spent any amount of time in economic development will tell you that most of a community’s job growth comes from existing businesses. So while attracting businesses is great, most of the growth is going to come from those businesses that are already there and I think the same is in many ways, going to end up being true with talent. That the talent you already have, fostering that talent, developing it and retaining it is going to be really important. That’s not to say that talent attraction isn’t important and isn’t something that can be done, but always that thing of paying attention to your backyard.

 

So as far as data, something we work a lot with is profile data and so that’s really just a way to know the people that are already in your community. You can pull out such neat stuff from profiles. You can get a sense of obviously like what institutions they’re graduating from, you can see the degree level of folks in your community and you can see are certain degrees leaving your community more often than others? Are certain degree folks coming to your community? So profile data is one that I think is really important.

 

Job posting data is also just super valuable to really understand the existing businesses in your community, where they’re heading. A lot of traditional LMI is really good for this framework and historical, a little bit looking backward approach. Government is great at collecting data and we can say here’s the trends that have been occurring, but what’s really neat with job posting data is it tells us what businesses want to do or intend to do. So I think for communities to have a really good sense of what their local employers are doing, as far as job postings and then on the talent attraction side and this world we live in. 

 

With so much remote work now, I think really just keeping a pulse on the percentage of remote workers in your community. What’s going on with that nationally? I think one of the big questions will be, where this remote work median returns to. I think before COVID, depending on what source you use, we use ACS data and I think in 2019, somewhere around 4% or 5% of folks nationally worked from home and then obviously COVID. I think a Gallup poll had something like 43% of all Americans were working from home and obviously white collar jobs were higher than that and so where does that number come back to? I don’t think many folks think it’s going to stay around 50%, it’s going to come back down to something.

 

So what does that mean for a particular community with where that remote job number lands and settles at I think, will be something that folks should be watching.

 

Amanda Ellis: All great points. I loved what you said at the beginning of your response about focusing on talent retention in addition to attraction and business retention. In addition to attraction, because a bit of a push and pull with those things and it’s easy to overlook what you already have and making those businesses and people want to stay too so, that is definitely something that should be a priority too.

 

Drew Repp: The remote work is interesting right now because there’s two sides to it. If you have a local employer who has a job posting and so it’s great for them, if they can hire remote talent so they can have a larger talent pool, but then maybe you have a local worker who now has increased competition for that job. Maybe they would’ve been competing with 15 people for a job and now they’re competing for 115 people. So then there’s the flip side, local residents can have access to a host of jobs outside their region as well. So there’s this give and take specifically on remote work, but you could count me as maybe a bit of a contrarian on the remote work side. I think many employers will eventually want people back in offices and I think many people will perhaps want to be back in an office as well.

 

Then I think we’re seeing some early signs this summer with all the efforts to reign in inflation and what that means with potential recession and seeing a lot of tech companies that are putting a hold on hiring or rescinding, doing layoffs. Many of us thought all the people that were jumping into remote work and allowing for people to move around a lot. So now, if that’s not going to be the case anymore, I think you’ll see folks looking more about what’s already just going on in their backyard.

 

Amanda Ellis: It’s going to be interesting to say the least.

 

Drew Repp: Absolutely.

 

Amanda Ellis: To see how things play out. What do you feel like Drew, are some overlooked data points that people in the economic development space should perhaps pay more attention to?

 

Drew Repp: I mentioned earlier job postings data. I think a lot of communities have started using that more, but I still think it’s overlooked and again, as I said earlier, the neatest thing about it is more forward looking. If an employer posts a job, it’s a signal as to what they want to do or intend to do. So, monitoring job posting data allows economic development groups to just be more forward looking, be less reactive and more proactive.

 

So I would say job postings data. Then also, skills data would be another one. Skills data is this really neat, additional layer to a labor market. I like to use this metaphor of, maybe you’re standing on the floor of the Grand Canyon and so you have this certain view of the Grand Canyon and that’s traditional labor market data. But if you’re standing up on the rim of the Grand Canyon, you have a much different view of that space. It’s still the same Grand Canyon, but a much different perspective.

 

I think that’s what skills and LMI do and so we’re just seeing in the market, that’s less of a focus on necessarily past job titles or education background and more of an emphasis on what are the skills that individuals have and the ability to transfer those skills. Then at more of a macro level, what are the skill clusters that are emerging in regions and areas traditionally, we’ve looked at it as like industry clusters and so, manufacturing cluster or a health cluster, but skills give this additional perspective. The one I like to think about is the Aerospace skill cluster in Seattle and the Puget Sound area looks different than the skill cluster in say, Huntsville, Alabama where there’s more space exploration type work going on. Still under the umbrella of aerospace, but much different skill clusters with different specialties and areas and that sort of thing. So, skills would probably be another one for sure.

 

Amanda Ellis: Job postings have come up a few times already and I believe you all have done some research on shifts in urban versus rural job postings? Can you talk a bit about that?

 

Drew Repp: Yeah, so we recently put out this report entitled Rurals Rise, and it’s my fault for titling it that.

 

Amanda Ellis: I was going to say, that’s a little bit of a tongue twister.

 

Drew Repp: That’s the title we went with so if you try to say it 10 times fast, I apologize.

 

Amanda Ellis: Good luck.

 

Drew Repp: Yeah, there’s been some folks that have already presented on it and they…

 

Amanda Ellis: They’re like, thanks a lot.

 

Drew Repp: Exactly. I got that message. Thanks for… Are you trying to play some joke on us? So yeah, we put out that report and so we did a neat thing. We looked at job postings between 2017 and 2019 as well as job postings between 2019 and 2021. We looked at just the differences between urban and rural and what was really interesting is that from 2017 to 2019, essentially the more urban a county, the more often you saw more of them owning the posting share of jobs.

 

So I’ll try to describe it here, but if you are essentially looking at like a scatter plot chart, as you move right on the X axis, and if that’s getting more urban, the more urban counties are, the more job posting share was showing up in those counties. So it’s almost like this reverse Nike swoosh, where they were seeing a higher share of job postings, but then from 2019 to 2021, that basically inverted downwards. So the more urban you got, the less percentage of job postings were showing up in urban areas and as you moved back on that X axis, essentially towards more rural communities, you saw a higher share of job postings.

 

So essentially, we had this big flip that occurred over the last three years and so even that the top 10 counties with the highest growth in postings over the last three years, nine of them were rural. It’s also interesting. It’s not specific to any one sector. It cuts across fields such as healthcare and tech, storage and transportation and science and so cutting across lots of different industries. Probably not too surprising, just with a lot of the anecdotes we’ve heard over the last few years, but a lot of high tech skills were emerging in those job postings.

 

So things like mobile app development and cloud computing, we saw a lot of marketing skills in those job postings in rural areas. So brand management, online marketing and web analytics and that sort of thing. A really neat study.

 

Another thing that jumped out was that I think of the top 20 occupations that are growing in those rural areas and job postings on average, they had about a 20% higher salary in wages than all other jobs in rural areas. We were seeing wage growth opportunities with those jobs that are being posted in those areas so that’s always exciting for communities to hear.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s all pretty fascinating.

 

Drew Repp: What’s neat about it too is, I think a lot of people, their mindset is oh, well, those are all these people we’ve heard about that are working remotely, but these are actual in person jobs. These were things like, nursing aids and postal workers and that sort of thing and so we did see that I think, during that 2019 to 2021 time frame that urban areas were much more likely to have employers posting for remote jobs. So I think they had like a 102% growth compared to 14% in rural communities, so it’s the urban jobs that are most likely posting for remote work. This job growth, this posting growth we’re seeing in rural areas are for actual jobs there.

 

I follow a lot of Brookings research and writing, and I know one of their writers talked about the 2010s as being potentially the decade of the city. It seems like we might be having a little bit of a flip where the 2020s now might be the decade of rural. We’ll have to see how it plays out, but at least this is an early indicator that might be the case.

 

Amanda Ellis: Big shift kicking off with the wonderful year of 2020 to start the decade. While we’re on the topic of your research, I know that you’ve also produced annual talent attraction scorecards, including from before the pandemic. So I’m sure that’s been interesting to see lots of big shifts there, and so those rank counties across the country on several different criteria, things like job growth, migration, data, educational attainment, things like that. What are some emerging themes that you’re seeing with that for this year?

 

Drew Repp: We’ll be putting that report out here in the fall and it’ll be, you’re right, it’ll be interesting. So the way the report works is, we pull in six metrics and one of them we use is, migration data and we use IRS migration data, which is really nice because it’s such a great, accurate representation of migration. Essentially, IRS says, okay a tax return was filed in county A one year and then in the next year was filed in county B and so we know that this migration occurred. So for this coming year, we will have 2020 migration data from the IRS. It will reflect what went on during that first major COVID year.

 

But even what we’ve been seeing already in last year’s scorecard and what I anticipate in this year’s, is essentially a continuing of this spreading out effect of suburbs and exurbs, gaining more people and for our scorecard essentially ranking well.

 

The last number of years, we’ve seen a lot of counties that surround major metros have ranked really well in our scorecard. That mirrors a lot of what we’ve been seeing in census data that over the last five to seven years, roughly. We’ve seen this spreading out of folks moving out of major metros and so our scorecard jives well with that. I think there’s a lot of anecdotal stories of people making big moves and going from a big city to a real farmhouse somewhere, things like that. But I think a lot of it is, people aren’t moving too far. Again, we see a lot of suburb counties really doing well in our rankings.

 

More generally this last year, and I anticipate it being probably the same in our next scorecard, is the Mountain West is doing really well. So Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Western Montana, they have lots of counties that have been ranking high. The Southeast is doing really well. Then for the last number of years, Texas and Florida have both had a number of counties in the top 10 and the top 50. We break it out by small counties, which is less than a 100,000 population and then large counties are over a 100,000, but both in small and large counties, Texas and Florida tend to do well.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. We’ve been seeing a lot of those trends too, with things we write about at Liverbility.com and covering some of that. I know one series of articles that have done really well for us, you were talking about suburbs, and we’ve done pieces on, Can’t afford to live in Chicago? Here’s some other ideas that are peripheral, nearby, but definitely the shift happening there is interesting.

 

Drew Repp: In our scorecard last year, we profiled Chicago a little bit, which is Cook county, if I’m not mistaken. We also have this data set, we call it our professional migration data and so it’s largely based off of again, profiles and of the top five counties, if I remember correctly, of essentially professional profiles that moved out of cook county. Four of the top counties that folks went to were surrounding counties. I think the fifth one was LA county and so folks, from what I can tell aren’t going too far, they are just spreading out a suburb exurb effect, which is kind of neat.

 

I think for a long time suburb and excerpts got this bad rap as being uninteresting and they always had to compete with major cities and what we’re seeing as happening places. Now that things are turning around a little bit where, the suburbs can really embrace who they are and people like what they have to offer.

 

Amanda Ellis: Well, and arguably, if commuting is less important because you’re not commuting as often, if at all, then that makes sense.

 

Drew Repp: Yeah, absolutely.

 

Amanda Ellis: One other thing we talk about a lot at Livability as we help communities with their marketing is, focusing less on general quality of life, just because every community has something they can tout, right, in that realm but focusing more on what specifically really sets them apart, makes them special, unique, what do they have that no other place really has? Do you have any advice for honing in on what those things are, what their special appealing attributes are?

 

Drew Repp: My thoughts on that are really just to be yourself and don’t try to be all things to all people. I think these last few years have really shown that different people are looking for different things and so you can’t try to hit all areas. I think, really just looking around at what has your community always been known for and focus on the positive things. If there’s negative things, don’t focus on those obviously, but what’s your community been known for and really embracing that and focusing on that and not trying to be someone else.

 

I think a lot of, again, where I’m based here in Spokane, Washington, which is Eastern Washington and we’ve always had the little sibling relationship with Seattle. I think that’s something that we struggled with for a long time but I think over the last five to 10 years, there’s been this real shift of, we have the Spokane region is its own place and it has lots of great things and so we’re not going to try to be Seattle anymore and just honing in on those things. I mentioned what’s a community known for and touting that Spokane has always been known as a running community. We had at one point the largest foot race, I think in the world. It’s called Bloomsday.

 

Amanda Ellis: Wow. Yeah.

 

Drew Repp: I think at one point it had 70 or 80,000 participants and even still, I think now it’s around 40 or 50,000.

 

Amanda Ellis: Did you participate?

 

Drew Repp: Yeah, I’ve run some Bloomsdays in my day.

 

Amanda Ellis: I don’t know if I would be participating, not much of a runner.

 

Drew Repp: We’re a running community and so that’s something to tout. I don’t think we should go and try to tout ourselves as a football community, Texas owns that. So, whatever those things are. We have a really neat startup, an entrepreneurial ecosystem here and so we’re not going to try to be Seattle or Silicon Valley’s, mirror their tech and startup scene. We have our own way of doing it and that’s going to jibe with certain people. All that to say, don’t try to be all things to all people and just focus on what you’re good at and tout that.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yes, be yourself. We talk about that a lot around here. Any communities you’d like to shout out that you feel like are doing a really great job of really anything we’ve talked about. Maybe using data effectively as part of their storytelling, or just really tapping like we just talked about, their special selling points in a unique way.

 

Drew Repp: One that comes to mind, we’ve worked quite a bit with the state of Nevada and especially early in the pandemic, obviously a very hospitality and tourist focused state and so that hit very hard by the pandemic. But even before that, they were just being very smart and forward looking at how to diversify their economy and their talent. They’re a state that is doing really well with leveraging skills data that I was talking about. They’re using skills to help individuals transfer between roles and to find ways to upscale and re-skill, so obviously a large population that’s worked in hospitality and that sort of thing, but there’s lots of skills that they have that can be transferred into growing industries in the state. So they’re a great example of just being forward, looking and again, focusing on that existing talent and recognizing the skills they have and how those can be transferred into other areas.

 

On the talent attraction side, Chamber RVA. So the Richmond Chamber in Virginia, they cover, I believe it’s a seven county area. So you have the Richmond county and then I think the six surrounding counties as well as their coverage area. They did a really good job of taking a really data driven approach to their talent attraction. They really looked at, I mentioned earlier that profile data, they dove into what are the degrees people are graduating with that typically move? What are the kind of degrees that are coming in? What programs are producing people that stay? So they really understand the profiles of people that are staying there and those that are moving away and those that are likely to move back. So I think, if community is going to really pursue a talent attraction program, if they’re going to put time and resources behind it, Chamber RVA is a good example of taking the time and the work to really understand how to make that be a good ROI for them.

 

So that whole thing of not trying to be all things to all people, they know the kind of talent to be recruiting and they know the kind of talent that they need to work at to keep. So Chamber RVA is probably a good one. Greater Memphis. We actually did a write-up on them recently. They’re a really neat one as far as really taking a different approach to metrics and moving away from not completely, but somewhat away from traditional economic development metrics, the GDP and capital investment. Not that those things aren’t important, but they’re taking a very people focused approach to their metrics. They have what they call their People Powered Prosperity Dashboard and so they’re looking at things like, what percentage of the population has less than a 20 minute commute to work and what percentage of their population is part of the Alice population? Basically their idea is that if people are thriving, the economy is going to thrive.

 

My personal view is, I think that’s where economic development metrics need to go, as opposed to always looking at business metrics that, if businesses are thriving, people are going to thrive. That might not always be the case and so Greater Memphis, I think, is doing neat things with hey, let’s make sure our people are thriving and we believe that if they’re thriving, everything else will follow. So Greater Memphis would probably be another one as well.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s awesome, I didn’t know that. I’m actually based in Tennessee and I wasn’t familiar with what they’re doing, so…

 

Drew Repp: Yeah, you should totally check it out. They’re doing some neat things and I think it all got started with them being a part of one of the programs with Brookings and looking at inclusive metrics and that sort of thing. They’re doing some neat things for sure.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Well, thank you Drew, that was a lot of great info. That’s almost all our time, but before we wrap up, I always close out our episodes by asking a fun question. You’re like, uh-oh, question that wasn’t on the list. What’s she going to ask? So you’re based in Spokane. How long have you lived there?

 

Drew Repp: I was born and raised here, was gone for about 10 years and now I’ve been back for about eight years.

 

Amanda Ellis: Alright, so a boomerang. So what is a bucket list item that someone visiting your city should make sure to do?

 

Drew Repp: Oh boy. Well, I mentioned Bloomsday, so if you ever want to come for Bloomsday, it’s always the first Sunday in May. Something else that’s actually coming up pretty soon, we have Hoop Fest, which is the world’s largest three on three basketball tournament, so they close down all of downtown and all the streets are turned into three on three basketball courts. If you’re a basketball fan, that’s something to come and see and do. Those are two things that jump to mind. I won’t tell you the fishing spots, but Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho area is fantastic fly fishing, so that’s definitely a bucket list item. I mentioned Lightcast has an office in Moscow, Idaho, which is about an hour and a half Southeast of Spokane. That’s in an area that’s called the Palouse. Palouse is an incredibly beautiful area, when people talk of amber waves of grain, that’s the Palouse, just beautiful rolling hills with just miles of beautiful wheat country. So, I would have to give a nod to checking out the Palouse for sure.

 

Amanda Ellis: Something for everybody it sounds like. I always learn something when I ask that question. Well, thank you so much Drew. That was awesome and it was great having you on.

 

Drew Repp: Thanks so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed my maiden voyage on a podcast. 

 

Amanda Ellis: Thank you. You did a good job. You have a good podcast voice, setting you up for success.

 

Drew Repp: Thanks.

 

Amanda Ellis: Alright, sounds good. Well Drew, thank you so much for taking some time out of your Friday.

 

Drew Repp: Absolutely. Thank you, Amanda.

  

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-size 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.