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(299) (160) (145) (142) (138) (112) (94) (79) (76) (73) (40) (23) (19) (14) (13) (7)Jerry Walls has been unemployed since October, when his company went bankrupt.
Both local residents were among more than 600 people who turned out for two informational sessions Monday afternoon at Spanish American Civic Association and later that evening at Pennsylvania CareerLink of Lancaster County at Liberty Place. Each session attracted more than 300 people.
They were interested in jobs at the Lancaster County Convention Center, which is scheduled to open April 21.
The convention center authority is looking to fill 125 to 150 full-time jobs, including pantry cooks, security guards, dishwashers, doormen and accounting clerks.
With the local jobless rate at 5 percent — the highest rate in 16 years — any news of available jobs was welcome.
"When you have bills to pay and you're trying to maintain your way of life, it's very hard," Hood, who attended the evening session, said.
CareerLink is offering the series of six informational sessions this week.
The crowd at Monday evening's session was so large that people had to be turned away and told to come to another session.
Mark Moosic, general manager of the center and adjacent Marriott Lancaster at Penn Square, outlined the steps of the hiring process during the hourlong briefings.
Moosic said the current situation has led to a tough environment in every industry, but he said it's a blessing that the center is able to add jobs in the community.
"Everybody is looking at facing a very uncertain economy, so we have to be careful that as we hire that we're doing what's right for our owners," Moosic said.
Hood, who lives in Mount Joy, said his job search has been "very disheartening" since he lost work in April. He said he has been filling out applications "till my hands have fallen off from writer's cramp."
Hood said he has done every kind of job from factory work to driving forklifts to working as a prep cook, but his lack of a specific skill set has limited his choices.
"I don't have much in the way of classical training, but what I've learned I learned as I went along," Hood said.
Walls, a Lititz resident who attended Monday evening's session, was working for a company based in New York selling services to Home Depot when his company went bankrupt in October.
Since then, he has been in the process of revamping his résumé, wanting to move from retail into customer service.
Walls said he wanted to get in on the ground floor of a new business like the convention center, and as someone who is "50-plus," he had no desire to retire.
"I feel like I'm a factory and I'm shutting down for a while, getting retooled to go back out and hit it some more," Walls said.
Moosic started off his career in hotels in a similar setting with a bad economy in 1980. He was a 19-year-old looking for work at a job fair and was hired as a dishwasher at the Marriott Hotel in Harrisburg.
He moved from dishwasher to room service a couple of months after starting his first job and from there to server captain and then assistant restaurant manager.
Today he is a general manager with Interstate Hotels and Resorts, which manages both the convention center, which is a public entity, and the adjoining Marriott hotel.
Moosic said he doesn't necessarily look for people with much experience. Rather he looks for employees who have a "blank slate" and the spirit for work and service.
"The hardest thing you have to do is unprogram people from bad habits or bad training," Moosic said. "And we're firm believers to say, 'Hey, let's get a person who has all the right skill levels, the right attitude,' and then we can teach them how to do the technical stuff."
The remaining sessions are:
• 10 a.m. today, Bright Side Opportunities Center, 515 Hershey Ave.
• 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, SACA, 30 N. Ann St.
• 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Southern Market Center, 100 S. Queen St.
• 10 a.m. Saturday, CareerLink, 1016 N. Charlotte St.
The Marriott hotel is a project of Penn Square Partners, a limited partnership consisting of Penn Square General Corp., a High Industries affiliate, and Penn Square Ltd. LLC, an affiliate of Lancaster Newspapers Inc., publisher of the Sunday News, Lancaster New Era and Intelligencer Journal.
E-mail: myoder@lnpnews.com
