A jobs mecca? How UC Davis is recruiting employees for its Sacramento campus
The sounds of a tectonic shift in the local labor market are echoing across UC Davis’ Sacramento campus and into Elmhurst, North Oak Park and other nearby neighborhoods.
You hear it at a once-sleepy entryway to campus on 2nd Avenue at Stockton Boulevard when an air horn pierces through not only the clanging metal of construction but also the beep, beep, beep of heavy equipment backing into position and the periodic rumbling of 18-wheelers ferrying materials to multiple worksites.
It sounds like a city center in the midst of a boom, and it looks like it as well. Two cranes soar above the skeleton frames of two buildings and a parking deck at the planned Aggie Square innovation hub. The cranes circle one another in a carefully coordinated dance that ensures they never collide, one of them slowly bearing a load of metal rods to the upper floors.
A third crane rises just behind the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, where yet another parking structure is taking shape to serve patients, faculty and staff. UC Davis Health will double the occupied square feet it will have on the campus by 2030, said Chief Executive David Lubarsky, so he’s taking a personal interest in keeping enough spots open to accommodate everyone.
The academic health system already has added a rehabilitation hospital, the Ernest E. Tschannen Eye Institute and a parking structure, but yet to come are a new hospital tower, the 48X ambulatory surgery center and the parking deck now under construction.
This expansion will transform the capital region.
‘Higher-paying jobs’
Business and economic consultant Sanjay Varshney said in a phone interview that the metamorphosis will more than reshape the look of the campus and nearby neighborhoods. It will bring jobs, with good salaries.
“Medical centers typically have higher-paying jobs,” said Varshney, the founder and chief economist for the Sacramento Business Review. “We are a region that has been challenged for high-paying jobs from the technology or other private sectors. Health care has been a bright spot for us.”
Certainly, some local health care players downsized after they struggled operating losses – or at least declining revenues – during the COVID-19 pandemic, Varshney noted in the Sacramento Business Review. Inflation will also pose a challenge, he said, but in the long run, jobs in this sector are expected to increase.
“By all indications, the region is poised to collaboratively — and competitively — create new and better ways to teach, deliver, and pay for healthcare,” Varshney wrote in his mid-2022 industry analysis. “Sacramento is positioned to model the way for the rest of the nation’s communities through forward-thinking medical education, conscientious expansion of care services, and facilities that focus on equitable delivery and judicious payment strategies.”
Gary May, the chancellor of the University of California, Davis, said his team still expects 25,000 new jobs to be added on the Sacramento campus as a result of the first phase of building at Aggie Square. As many as 5,000 construction jobs will be needed to accomplish this expansion, he said.
Lubarsky said the health system now employs roughly 17,000 people, 13,000 of them on the Sacramento campus. When the current build-out is complete in 2030, Lubarsky estimated that about 20,000 people will be working for UCDH on the Sacramento campus.
As May, Lubarsky and other university leaders began discussing the sheer size of their expansion, they realized that the university and health system, anchored as they were in the community, could serve as something of a buffer or stabilizing force when misfortune or economic downturns hit, said Hendry Ton, associate vice chancellor for health equity, diversity and inclusion. Those talks led them to develop an anchor institution mission, which they called AIM for Health, that put the emphasis on employment or recruiting as a way to foster community resilience, Ton said.
“We’ve been thinking over the past number of years, ‘What can we do to really improve workforce?”” Ton said. “We know that the pathway to the best health has to do with having a stable job. When you have a stable job, you’re less stressed out. We see in studies that, when people have less economic distress, their health improves.”
Hiring residents in the neighborhood
When Aggie Square was announced, however, some residents of Oak Park, Tahoe Park and other neighborhoods near the medical center questioned whether people in their communities would get any of the new jobs. And, if they did, would they be paid enough to ensure they could maintain their homes in the face of anticipated gentrification?
The city and the university set up a fund to help community members ward off displacement, and the university and its general contractor agreed to place a priority on hiring residents living near the Sacramento campus.
“As part of our anchor institution mission, we’ve identified 10 community ZIP codes that have a significantly high rate of poverty that are within a 30-minute commute of UC Davis,” Ton said. “We want to make sure that whatever we do, that these communities that are traditionally again under-served in education, in food, in health (care), in economic benefit, that we’re not forgetting them. In fact, we’re prioritizing them with these jobs.”
Roughly 17% of the UC Davis Health workforce now live in those 10 areas, Ton said, and they plan to increase that percentage.
Working to improve economic well-being is exactly what the university and its health system were built to do, Ton said. UCD and its general contractors have been working closely with Sacramento-area nonprofits, labor organizations and the state’s Employment Development Department to identify potential candidates.
Lyndon Huling, who supervises talent acquisition for all UCD campuses , said the university isn’t sitting back and waiting for candidates to show up. Rather, he said, people on his team and others in Ton’s department are reaching out to find the unemployed or underemployed who are looking for new and better opportunities.
To make the application process less intimidating and confusing, Huling’s team has explained the ins and outs to workforce development experts at Asian Resources, the Fruitridge Career Center, Greater Sacramento Urban League, La Familia Counseling Center and the California Employment Development Department, Huling said.
‘Demystifying the application process’
UC Davis is always striving to simplify the application process, he said, and that could mean something as fundamental as changing how job descriptions are written to ensure that the nomenclature used in the health care field is explained.
“Our focus in terms of that community outreach is all about demystifying the application process,” Huling said, “and really giving folks a peek behind the curtain to understand what we’re looking for as recruiters and what departments are seeking. We talk a lot about how to stand out as an applicant, but also how to do well in the interview process.”
They offer 30-minute, one-on-one career chats to help potential applicants find jobs that mesh with their background, Huling said, and they will critique resumes as part of those sessions and advise job candidates on how to put their best foot forward.
They also host job talks in partnership with community organizations where they educate a number of candidates in what to expect of the application process and what type of jobs they offer, hopefully increasing the sense of confidence job seekers will have, Huling said.
One piece of advice he offered: The university will look only at applicants who meet its minimum qualifications.
“Many times, what people will do is just take the same resume and apply for 20 or 30 jobs without looking at the job that they’re applying for and really keying in on those qualifiers,” Huling said. “We can’t hire somebody if they don’t meet the minimum qualifications for a job.”
However, if job candidates have what they consider to be transferable experience, he said, they can rest assured that recruiters or screeners will consider it. In fact, Huling noted, Lubarsky removed a hiring mandate that required bachelor’s degrees for most positions, so recruiters and screeners also can consider relevant work experience.
The thing is, that experience could be missed if candidates haven’t customized their resumes to emphasize it, Huling said.
“I usually recommend that somebody find maybe a handful of jobs that really do align with their past work history and focus on really crafting a resume that speaks to that role, as opposed to just trying to get an interview by taking a volume-based approach where you just throw your resume into the wind and hope for something,” Huling said.
Two other tips: UC Davis screeners welcome a longer resume if it goes beyond work history to present a holistic perspective on the candidate’s volunteerism, leadership skills, commitment to diversity, or other relevant life or work experience, Huling said. And, he said, the cover letter often helps a candidate stand out to the person or committee making a hiring decision, so take care when writing it.
More than health jobs
People tend to think of UC Davis Health as employing only doctors and nurses, Huling said, but the academic health system’s campus is almost like a small city and it needs personnel in an array of fields.
“Folks don’t really ... understand that we have a lot of customer service positions,” Huling said. “We have a lot of positions that help support the structure of the hospital and the enterprise at large.”
He said he often talks about a position known as the patient access representative. These individuals greet patients and take their information when they walk into the hospital for an appointment, he said, but there’s a need for these representatives in virtually every department at UC Davis Health.
In terms of qualifications, applicants for those jobs just need to have some type of customer service background, Huling said. While it certainly helps if you’ve worked in a hospital in the past, he said, that’s not a prerequisite to be considered for the role.
The health system also will have some positions that require a construction background, so although the build-out will end, some workers on those projects could end up finding permanent positions on the facilities management team, Huling said.
“UC Davis Health is expanding exponentially with new buildings and facilities,” he explained, “and so we’re going to continue to see construction roles, labor and maintenance positions. It takes a lot to keep a hospital running, and it’s actually a neat opportunity for folks to get hospital experience. That is valuable, not only having a maintenance background, but also knowing how to do that work in a way that maintains patient safety and continuity of health care.”
Both the university and the health system operate their own temporary employment service to fill the need for part-time help. In the past, Huling and Ton said, roughly 71% of people hired for temporary service ultimately found full-time employment within one of the two organizations.
“We recruit folks to be part of a talent pool,” Huling said, “so we have an analysts pool, a custodial pool, a food service pool, a labor pool. What’s nice about those opportunities is you’re competing to be part of a group of people that we can tap to place around the organization, as opposed to competing for a single career position against other internal and external candidates.”
Ton said: “This is a pathway to permanent employment, and so we’ve been in discussions with the city to look at how we can position the new jobs center to help upskill residents from our community to take advantage of our temporary employment jobs as well as our other jobs so that they can .be part of the (labor force) that then tracks into UC Davis for permanent jobs.”
While much of the focus here has been on jobs that will be added in future, the university and UCD Health already are recruiting for hundreds of jobs at hr.ucdavis.edu. Feel you need a little extra help? When you get that page, click on the Careers tab at left, and you’ll be directed to a page where you can request a career chat.
May said he hopes people in nearby neighborhoods want to be part of the growth story on the Sacramento campus because he and Lubarsky have worked to change the “ivory tower” image that the university has had for many years.
“We really are trying to make an effort to be an asset to the community and not viewed as something that’s to be an obstacle or something to be avoided or concerned about, but really be an integral asset to the community,” May said.
The university and health system have started by doing ground-level hiring, especially from under-served communities, Lubarsky said, and they have established career pathways, mentoring, and other opportunities to steer those employees into the ranks of management.
The goal, he said, is to ensure that management also is fully reflective of the surrounding community.
This story was originally published February 8, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
