Online services help link employers, job seekers

Suppose you're a dairy farmer, and you need people to milk the cows. Or you're an agricultural association, and you need someone who's savvy with numbers or food safety policy.

Where to look? On the Web, maybe? But where?

Although there's a vast array of websites useful for finding or filling jobs—think Monster.com, CareerBuilder, Craigslist and others—a handful of sites have launched that are geared toward the unique demands of California agriculture.

One of these, tailored for people doing blue-collar labor on the farm, is AgJobs4U.com. Another, catering to white-collar professionals, is CalAgJobs.com.

Jennifer Pitigliano, a dairy veterinarian, co-founded AgJobs4U.com about a year ago with her almond-farmer husband. It used to be that people looking for farm work would just walk right up to the farm, she said, but that rarely happens anymore. Pitigliano said general job-seeking websites didn't cater to what farms need.

"We are really tailored to a bilingual workforce," she said. "We're more of the dirty-boots-on-the-ground type of people, and we wanted to make sure our site was tailored to that demographic."

Pitigilano said she wanted people to feel comfortable filling in their information in their native tongues, with no need for a translator.

"We wanted to make sure we were catering to those people who were looking for jobs," she said.

Those who are looking for professional work in agriculture can seek it on CalAgJobs.com. Shannon Douglass, the site's director of outreach, said that working with younger people, encouraging them to pursue careers relating to agriculture, evolved into finding specific people for specific jobs. That led to an e-newsletter and eventually the launch of CalAgJobs in 2013.

When she was doing recruiting work, Douglass said, she found agricultural companies would list openings with the general job sites but "weren't getting enough ag people in there."

She cited a survey from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Purdue University, showing there were only enough qualified people for about half the professional agricultural jobs expected to be available.

"When you have this already strong demand in ag, and then you use Craigslist or something, and you need someone with ag, you get bombarded with these resumes and applications that are not a fit," she said. "You get a large quantity of applicants, but the quality of them isn't necessarily what you need."

Douglass said people may perceive agriculture as a shrinking industry, but the strong demand for qualified employees in professional areas such as food safety and agronomy tends to indicate otherwise.

"Most of our positions are wanting a four-year degree," Douglass said, specifically agricultural degrees.

Pitigliano, on the other hand, is mainly helping farmers find people with a high degree of skill in the barn, in the field or behind the wheel.

"We built it, ultimately, for the non-college ag people," Pitigliano said, adding that her site does offer "a handful of jobs" for college graduates.

Websites now can detect whether their users are on a smartphone, tablet or PC, and tailor the page accordingly. In the case of AgJobs4U, Pitigliano said the mobile version was made with smartphone-toting employees in mind, whereas the desktop version was made for employers in the farm office.

She said feedback from users has been positive, with some people making constructive suggestions as to how to improve the site. A new version, incorporating those suggestions, will launch within the next few weeks, she said.

One satisfied customer is Brit Baxley, a third-generation dairy farmer in Visalia, who said he's used AgJobs4U to hire milkers.

"I like that, if I need a guy, I can go through a couple hundred people—as many as I like—and just call and find someone with experience," Baxley said.

Before finding this site, Baxley used an offline social network to find people.

"We used to have to basically go through all the guys that work with me, and then ask them if they have friends, and then their friends have friends," he said. "You're kind of just going blind, not knowing if you're getting anyone experienced or anything like that."

Perusing profiles on AgJobs4U has yielded better results, he said.

"Everything's listed, whether people are experienced in dairy or packinghouse or whatever, so I can get someone who has experience on a dairy," Baxley said. "It makes the training much easier."

The CalAgJobs site received a U.S. Department of Agriculture block grant in 2015, Douglass said, and used it to add an internship section.

"We need to keep growing our pool of applicants and candidates in agriculture," she said. "Our hope is that with these internships, that we can get not only more companies offering internships and looking for interns, but we can also get more students considering these internships in agriculture."

Of course, before people can use the sites, they have to know they exist.

Pitigliano said she's advertised AgJobs4U in a number of publications, including this one; handed out giveaways at meetings and conventions; and used old-school marketing such as freeway billboards to attract employers. Word of mouth has also been helping, she said.

Douglass spends a lot of time on the road, taking CalAgJobs to trade shows and career fairs. She recently visited Fresno State, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Chico State.

"For the students, we do a lot of social media marketing," Douglass said, making heavy use of Facebook and LinkedIn.

With sites off and running, the challenge becomes how to keep them going.

"This is very much new to us," Pitigliano said. "We really want to make sure that we still have plenty of people coming into the site. We want to be able to keep it fresh, because the right person might have just signed up."

(Kevin Hecteman is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. He may be contacted at khecteman@cfbf.com.)