KERSHAW COUNTY, S.C. — Since the pandemic, many places have been struggling to hire, but experts and local businesses say they are seeing things moving in the right direction.
"Here recently in the last month, I'd say a month and a half, it's been booming," said Velvet Honey Brewtique manager Hannah Kelley. "Everybody's been coming back, asking for jobs, they are like, you know, I can come in whenever, wherever, do this, do that."
Kelley says they have been faced with a staffing shortage since COVID, but since January, applications have been flying in.
"We obviously had to shorten our hours, you know, arrange days where you know there were some days we couldn't be open at all, Lelley said. "Nobody to work, it was a ghost town, we were posting we're hiring, we're hiring, we're hiring and it was nobody."
Alan Blackmon owns a restaurant in the Camden area and says hiring has improved significantly, "I've seen an improvement first of all in customers inquiring for work," Blackmon said. "I've been fortunate enough to hire 2 employees, which has about got me back up to our normal staff now. I do have some part-time workers that come in."
The South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce (SCDEW) says it's a positive trend they are seeing statewide.
"We're seeing a slight drawback in job openings and hiring, that's to be expected with what the federal reserve has been doing increasing interest rates at a rapid clip over the last year, so that suggests that there may well be an opportunity for the proverbial soft landing we've all heard so much about, in terms of bringing down inflation, bringing down sorta the overheating components of the labor market without crashing the economy," said SCDEW Assistant Director for Labor Market Information Dr. Bryan Grady.
Grady said there are currently around 400 job positions open in Kershaw County, with an average salary of $20 an hour.
As for the next few months, Grady says people should not expect a major change in the current conditions of the job market, but there might be a gradual slowdown in hiring.
The top job in demand in Kershaw County and across most of the state is for registered nurses.