There’s a black hole in the white collar work force. Some San Fernando Valley companies are increasingly struggling to fill executive, managerial and administrative spots and relying on amenities outside the workplace to attract applicants. Sage Publications, Inc. for instance, is one of the top academic publishing companies in the world, yet the Thousand Oaks firm still faces the challenge of attracting executives to work there. That’s due in part to publishing centers being located elsewhere in the world New York, Boston, London and Amsterdam, company President and Chief Executive Officer Blaise Simqu said. “It’s definitely not in Thousand Oaks,” Simqu said at a recent Gold Coast Business Forum event. “But I use the school district as a recruiting tool. The climate and low crime are fantastic selling points.” Mark Fisher, vice president for human resources at West Hills Hospital, admits having a tough time finding the right people to fill clerical positions at the facility. That may be due in part to a change in work ethics and a lack of certain skills, Fisher said. “A lot of people don’t have the initiative and drive we had seen previously,” Fisher said. “People tend to want to do just things that they like to do and not do other things that are part of the job.” Much anecdotal evidence suggests that San Fernando Valley companies face challenges in filling white collar positions. While the Valley, with its technology, biotech, manufacturing and financial companies, has a high number of traditional white collar positions an exact figure is not known. The San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge, tracks employment figures by industry rather than occupation, said its director Daniel Blake. In 2004, Valley employment increased by 1.7 percent with the biggest industry growth areas in construction, and food service and accommodations. “Employers are not tapping into the big white collar labor pool,” Blake said. “They are drawing on people with vocational skills.” Jenni Kwon, economic development director with the Valley Economic Development Center, said there is a polarization of the job market with a concentration in either low-wage, low-skill jobs or high-wage, high skill jobs. “There’s not a whole lot in between,” Kwon said. “There are a number of these high-wage, mid-skill jobs but they are not growing at the rate they should be.” One national study, however, does point to growth in the white collar sector. A 2003 report by the Department of Professional Employees for the AFL-CIO projected that one subset of the white collar workforce, professional and related occupations, will account for 20 percent of total employment by 2010. In 2002, overall white collar positions which includes all clerical workers made up 60 percent of the national workforce, the study found. The growth translates into a situation where the market is in the job seekers’ favor and they can be picky about where they want to work. Already, companies seeking new executives expect much longer searches and will at times accept less than qualified candidates, said Fleming Jones, a consultant with McDermott & Bull, a Woodland Hills executive search firm. “They’re willing to pay a premium to find candidates who are already in the community and convince them to switch to their company,” Jones said. Executive headhunter Dianne Gubin, however, is of the opinion that employers are not having a tough time filling white collar positions. What she sees happening is companies being much pickier about who they hire and prefer a lateral hire over an employee entering an industry who needs to be cross trained, said Gubin, president of Tech Exec Partners, Inc., a Woodland Hills executive search and consulting firm. “There is so much pressure on hiring managers that they are afraid of making the wrong decision,” Gubin said. “With a lateral hire they don’t risk making that mistake.” Gubin said she is seeing this across the industries she works with biotech, entertainment, manufacturing, and mortgage and finance. “Unless someone has grown up in that industry, they don’t want to look at you,” Gubin said. For at least the banking industry, an absence of training programs may be a reason behind a lack of qualified bankers. Training programs by major banks have been phased out for some time few and currently there is no one offering those programs, said Gary Coleman, a regional vice president with American Business Bank in the San Fernando Valley region. “The reason is that other banks were using these training programs to recruit employees and the banks spending all that money on their training programs felt they weren’t getting the returns they once did,” Coleman said. Even the public sector is not immune to the difficulty faced by private companies, as evidenced at CSUN. The school is in process of designing a 14-acre development for rental and for sale housing that will be offered at 25 percent below market rate as a means to attract and retain faculty and staff, said Tom McCarron, director of the North Campus University Park Redevelopment Corp., a not-for-profit agency. “I hear from the provosts and the deans and the department heads they are put off trying to recruit or even retain faculty who have started in the past few years,” McCarron said. “You have PhDs coming here to start a career and then find it very difficult (to find affordable housing). I don’t see it getting better in the near future.” The project is still in the design phase and the townhouse units are expected to be occupied in 2008, McCarron said.