Bloom Energy : How some Bay Area businesses are trying to entice workers to return

Fast Water Heater in San Jose is offering $1,000 referral bonuses to anyone who can help them find new workers. Bloom Energy is touting mental health counseling benefits and up to a $1,200 signing bonus for new hires as it looks to expand. And in Danville, restaurant owner Darren Matte has eked out a small hourly pay boost to attract workers.

Throughout the Bay Area, companies both large and small are struggling to refill their ranks after last year's business shutdowns drove laid off workers to seek pandemic unemployment assistance or find new jobs in other industries. But as bigger companies offer increasingly generous rewards, smaller companies with leaner budgets are struggling to compete in a worker driven market.

Angela Sampson, recruiting manager for Fast Water Heater, which installs and repairs water heaters, said the company offered hiring bonuses to new hires, finder's fees to anyone who referred a worker and lowered their minimum qualifications for any "kind of handy tooly people" as they tried to hire about three workers a month. Business was up with more people at home, but even with added incentives for workers, recruiting has been a struggle.

"It broke my heart," said Sampson, "but it went a whole entire month without hiring anybody."

Months after pandemic reopenings, half of small businesses across the country said they had job openings they could not fill, according to an August survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

For Bloom Energy, a 20-year-old public company with over 1,000 employees in a growing industry, incentives have paid off. The company had planned for a 2020 expansion, so to fill positions in the midst of an increasingly competitive hunt for workers, Bloom lowered its minimum qualifications, bought billboard ads in English, Vietnamese and Spanish, added new parental leave and therapy sessions to their health care package, and offered up to $1,200 signing bonuses for the first time.

"The number of applicants that are applying to these roles has increased exponentially," said Sonja Wilkerson, chief people officer at Bloom Energy, who said the company gained around 300 employees during the pandemic. Bloom Energy plans to maintain many of the added benefits beyond the pandemic.

But in the hard-hit restaurant industry, Darren Matte says new benefits and big signing bonuses are out of the question. Only about one-sixth of small businesses nationally have offered signing or referral bonuses or expanded health care benefits, according to the NFIB survey. About 63% of small companies raised wages during the pandemic.

Matte's San Francisco restaurant, Perdiem, closed in March and he's now scrambling to keep open his two Danville restaurants, Cocina Hermanas and Danville Harvest. During the pandemic shutdowns, Matte said he furloughed most of his staff and transitioned to take-out. He was already cash strapped from the loss of customers and when the city allowed outdoor dining, which he hadn't been able to do until streets were closed to allow restaurants more space to serve, that came with added costs. He said the propane bills for outdoor heaters he runs cost $3,000 a month.

Matte says extra pandemic unemployment benefits made it harder to hire. "We are competing against the government," he said. "People got used to making $4,000 a month on unemployment."

But even though an additional $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits meant higher earnings for most recipients, a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found, those now-expired benefits caused only a small portion of recipients to avoid returning to work.

Instead, some people changed careers. Nearly 25% of workers nationally sought different jobs during the pandemic, citing better wages and benefits, trying something new, and a healthier work life balance, according to a survey by the insurance company Prudential.

It's a dilemma Matte said he's noticed. Like other service workers, restaurant employees face higher risk of exposure from daily interactions with the public and also bear the brunt of having to enforce mask mandates, debates about vaccines and a host of other pandemic issues.

"These poor entry level employees are on the front line of these topics," he said.

By June, when California officially reopened, Matte was swamped with customers - but not employees. To entice applicants, Matte squeezed a $9 wage increase out of the remaining money, adding extra free meals for workers, and proffered up to a $300 referral bonus.

Three cook jobs and two front-of-house positions have remained open for over three months as restaurants throughout the Bay Area have faced a huge hiring crisis.

"There's no meat left on the bone to provide other incentives," he said.