🔒Hire ground: Northern Maine employers hustle to attract — and keep — workers

Running a rural town in Maine’s least populous county isn’t a mere desk job for Mike Roy, a retired FedEx operations executive now working as Greenville’s jack-of-all-trades town manager. He often helps drive the snowplow, clearing snow from streets and parking lots.

“I plowed for the last three winters because of the lack of staffing,” Roy says.

While there are also more routine tasks like defusing public arguments over traffic lights — blinking versus the standard red-yellow-green that some newcomers demand when the initial allure of small-town life wears off — workforce challenges remain top of mind for Roy.

Along with child care and housing, Roy sees employment as one leg of a three-legged stool needed to support the local economy. Given housing shortages and falling enrollment at the Greenville Consolidated School — in a county whose median age of 51.4 in 2023 is the highest in a state that’s already the nation’s oldest — that stool is wobbly at best.

“We’ve become a retirement community,” he says. That, plus fewer people looking for work as reflected in the county’s 3.7% jobless rate along with rising home prices, is prompting employers to kick up their hiring game.

In some cases, the resourcefulness extends to bringing in temporary or seasonal workers from other states or countries, and cutting through red tape. The town’s Public Works Department, for example, hired one employee who’s “doing everything except drive a truck” as he works toward getting that certification in the next six months, Roy says. “We got creative.”

The same is true of private employers across a region that’s popular for outdoor recreation and second homes but without enough year-round housing for locals. From hospitality to health care and manufacturing, businesses are navigating the same pressures in different ways.

Improvising at the inn

Spread across 79 hilly acres overlooking Moosehead Lake like a Swiss Alpine paradise, the Blair Hill Inn is a 10-room luxury hotel with a gourmet restaurant called Slate.

Owner Jenn Whitlow left a corporate job with a large Minnesota-based health care company to buy both businesses, which she initially operated year-round but now opens from mid-May through Nov. 1 because of winter staffing hardships and weather hassles.

Other seasons are also tough, especially in summer when many local staffers like to take vacations. To allow for more flexible schedules, Whitlow brings on temporary foreign workers in the U.S. on H-2B visas for non-agricultural workers. Out of 42 people on the payroll this year, nine are H-2Bs. They include a bartender from Turkey, a server from Argentina, two cooks from Mexico, a pastry chef from Italy, and two cooks and three housekeepers from Jamaica.

While other local employers hire international students on J-1 visas, that’s not attractive to Whitlow because those students return home at the start of her busy autumn season.

The H2-Bs “come to us with experience, and so they are here for six months — essentially the whole season,” she says. Once in this country, they can apply for extensions for up to three years, doing six rotations of six months at a time.

“It’s a very simple process that is complex to stay on top of,” Whitlow says, relying on an outside firm to manage documentation and visa appointments. “As a small business owner you’re washing dishes one day, bartending the next and checking in guests, so staying on top of paperwork would have been a recipe for failure for me.”

She does, however, provide transportation and housing. She turned a minivan she formerly used to transport her two Great Danes — Lucy and Finnegan, a regular greeter at the hotel — into an employee shuttle.

“It helps that we live in a small town, so all the distances are short,” she says.

She also rents houses for staff members from away, even contacting homeowners looking to sell as soon as dwellings are listed to see if they’re interested in a six-month lease agreement.

“I’m pounding the pavement looking for housing for my team,” she says.

With some exceptions, most employees are locals, including three freshly minted high school graduates and a restaurant hostess who used to be a breakfast server and housekeeper. Whitlow’s longest-serving employee, in her 28th season, works at Slate and owns the local preschool.

“We really value and adore our local workforce,” says Whitlow, who says she pays above-market salaries and raises as well as end-of-season bonuses.

Swabbing up hires in Guilford

Down the road in Guilford, Puritan Medical Products is a third-generation family-owned manufacturer of swabs and single-use specimen collection devices for medical, research and forensic uses. It produces more than a billion swabs annually and has been on a hiring spree over the past six months.

The effort requires restoring goodwill after a restructuring two years ago, when the company that achieved a global profile during the pandemic trimmed 272 jobs and closed its plant in Tennessee.

“The brand image was hurt a little bit in 2023, and so we’ve been building that back,” says President and CFO Bob Shultz. Part of the strategy is fostering community goodwill, like participating in the Piscataquis River Festival parade. Dozens of employees took part in the late July festivities clad in green company T-shirts and wielding supersized swabs.

“Puritan killed it at the parade,” Shultz gushes afterwards. “It was an incredible outpouring of community, and Puritan was excited to be an integral presence.”

Currently at 509 total employees, including 278 in Guilford and 214 in the Somerset County town of Pittsfield, Puritan is looking to fill more than a dozen roles in Guilford.

“As we move forward we will continue to add strategically as necessary,” Shultz says.

New hires this year include Chuck Campbell, who was promoted to Guilford’s site director in June four months after starting as continuous improvement manager. While working for Walpole Outdoors in Pittsfield, he was contacted by a recruiter for Puritan.

Despite some initial concerns about the restructuring, Campbell was reassured about Puritan’s finances and growth. He finds operator jobs the hardest to fill, and says that as long as someone has a good attitude, performance can be taught. He also says that housing doesn’t typically come up in job interviews, nor does he mind his 45-minute commute from Pittsfield.

“It’s a very nice drive, through some of the nicest parts of rural Maine,” he says. “I started in the winter, and I have yet to see the fall, when it should be even more beautiful.”

A hospital that’s fully staffed

Back in Greenville, Northern Light CA Dean Hospital is crafting solutions to workforce gaps as hospitals nationwide tackle financial challenges.

That’s mainly out of necessity for a small institution with an oversized role, providing primary and specialty care in Greenville as well as at health centers in Sangerville and Monson.

Surrounded by trees and unusually quiet in late July even for a rural medical facility, the 114-year-old hospital got a $27 million upgrade completed in early 2024.

Licensed for up to 25 beds as a Critical Access Hospital, CA Dean is equipped with 15 inpatient rooms and beds in the new building and renovated wing. The revamp, financed in part via a $6.2 million capital campaign, includes a new ambulance station with six adjacent dorm rooms for visiting emergency room doctors. While some drive up from Portland or elsewhere in New England, others fly in from out of state to work 72-hour shifts on a per diem basis.

“It allows us to have medical doctors here 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to care for emergencies as well as inpatients,” says Marie Vienneau, who serves as president of Northern Light CA Dean Hospital in Greenville and Mayo Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft about 35 miles to the southeast. “We have to be very creative to retain our staff here.”

To build its local medical team, the hospital has joined forces with Mayo to create free in-house training programs for both certified nursing assistants and nurses. Participants become part-time employees during the program so they can hit the ground running later as new hires.

Recent “Earn to Learn” graduates include Amy Phillips Breton, now employed as a full-time certified nursing assistant helping patients with daily tasks such as bathing, getting dressed and walking.

Open to a future in nursing, she says that “I love it all” and appreciates that “anyone who works here loves to teach and explain.”

Nikki Chadwick, vice president of education and preparedness at Dean and Mayo hospitals, believes that that being small is a selling point to job candidates. Even compared to Mayo, Dean is much more of a community where everyone knows everyone “and it’s very easy to embed yourself and feel part of the culture,” she says.

With around 35 registered nurses on staff, CA Dean will soon no longer have to employ travel nurses — which, due to agency fees along with transportation and housing stipends, can be three times as expensive.

“That’s going to be really exciting.” Vienneau says.

Dean Hospital is fully staffed despite challenges recruiting physicians in primary care as well as for specialties such as general surgery and orthopedics. To overcome the shortages, the hospital sometimes calls on specialists from other institutions in the Northern Light system. It also offers telehealth services in behavioral health and dermatology and offers mammography screenings to women across the region via a $1 million mobile unit launched last year.

Cuts in Medicaid funding for the entire sector could cast a cloud on finances going forward — one think tank estimates that Maine hospitals could lose as much as $66 million.

“We are very concerned about what future cuts will bring, but we have certainly been challenged financially and are making changes across our system,” says Vienneau, who will take up a new role as president of Northern Light Mercy Hospital in Portland in early October.

Housing pipeline

Behind the hospital, a project is underway that promises to help ease the local housing crunch. The $12.5 million plan calls for building 28 homes on 5.5 acres owned by the Northern Forest Center, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit active in the area for more than 25 years.

While developers are still working out the mix of singles and duplexes and price points, the goal is to produce year-round homes that average wage earners can afford to buy or rent.

“We see a lot of communities, as home prices go up and there’s more demand for second homes, at risk of being hollowed out,” says Mike Wilson, senior program manager and a founding member of the organization, which has grown from three to 25 staffers.

“We’re interested in trying to address the need for the long-term sustainability and viability of Greenville’s community as a place where people live, raise families, have kids in the schools and engage in civic life – not a place that becomes only a place for second-home owners.”

Backers include CA Dean, which Wilson anticipates will be able to use the infrastructure the project is creating for additional construction on its property when the time is right.

Trees for the Spruce Street Housing Project were cleared in a matter of hours in late July, save those that Wilson marked with orange tape that morning. The plan is to get formal bids and contracts in place by this winter, start building next summer and wrap up in 2027, Wilson says.

In an ideal world, Town Manager Mike Roy would like to see older residents wanting to downsize to relocate to Spruce Street, freeing up larger homes for households with children.

“We need young families to come with students to support the school, and we need workers,” he says. Some extra snow plow drivers would come in handy, too.