Hiring remains tough in Duluth as area continues pandemic recovery

DULUTH — The new BoomTown Duluth restaurant just north of the city has been in recruiting mode for months, unable to hire enough staff to open.

Restaurant owners have held job fairs, raised wages and offered workers training, health insurance, flexible hours and 401(k) benefits.

"We're still a few shy of where we want to be in Duluth," said owner Jessica Lietz.

The demand for workers in the area's tight labor market remains high, with plenty of open jobs and high unemployment persisting.

The Duluth area's unemployment rate ticked down in the last month, to 4.8% from 5% in March. There was a small increase to the pool of workers in April.

"We're heading in the right direction, but at a slower pace than earlier in the year," said Carson Gorecki, regional labor analyst with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED).

Between March and April, the Duluth metro area — St. Louis, Carlton and Douglas (Wis.) counties — gained 952 jobs, or 0.7%, according to state figures released Tuesday. Meanwhile the labor force grew by less than 100 workers. The area still has 7,200 fewer jobs than it did in February 2020, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Industries with the largest gains were leisure and hospitality; mining, logging and construction and professional and business services. Compared to the same time last year, the growth in the hospitality industry is up 82%.

"That sounds astronomical," Gorecki said, "but that industry's employment is still down from before the pandemic. It doesn't get us back to where we were before."

Lietz also owns Gilbert's Whistling Bird and two other BoomTown locations on the Iron Range with her husband, Erik. The Duluth restaurant — slated for a June opening — was meant to open in May 2020, sidelined by the pandemic. Lietz said line cooks and other back-of-house positions have been hardest to fill in Duluth and in their other locations.

"With the uncertainty of the last year, a lot of people got jobs outside this industry," Lietz said.

A recent DEED analysis of Minnesota unemployment insurance claims found that 59% of workers who filed a claim from March 2020 to June of that year were recalled by the same employer who laid them off, while 21% remained unemployed and continued to request benefits. With that high number of recalls, "a lot of people showed they were willing to wait around to see if the job they were initially laid off from opened back up," Gorecki said.

Jana Hollingsworth • 218-508-2450