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Iowa city makes effort to curb young wanderlust

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published March 06, 2006

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( 6 votes, average: 3.9 out of 5)
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So why do graduates from Iowa universities invariably turn tail and head for what they presume are brighter prospects elsewhere?

"Unfortunately, that's what often happens here," said Jenna Woline, a member of the Greater Des Moines Partnership and a recruiter for the Palmer Group, a Des Moines staffing firm.


Woline should know. As soon as she graduated from college, she left Iowa and headed to Washington, D.C.

"I got the itch," she said. "But after a while in Washington, I began to miss a lot of things about the everyday life here and I started looking at Iowa in a new light."

The phenomenon of young people leaving their hometowns for big city bright lights is nothing new. But when it becomes so prevalent that it affects the demographic balance of a city like Des Moines, it's time to challenge those young people by showing that the grass isn't always greener.

"I went to college in Iowa City - in eastern Iowa - where a lot of students from Chicago also went," Woline says. "But when they graduated, they all headed back to Chicago."

That's why the Greater Des Moines Partnership's Young Professionals Connection is trying to retain the best and brightest of its college graduates with a campaign known as "Four Hire!" Four local companies have stepped up, each guaranteeing to offer at least one top-flight job to students graduating this spring.

The goal is to call attention to the Midwest city's best attributes, to demonstrate that Des Moines holds promise for career and social adventures as alluring as those elsewhere.

"We took a look around and found that so many college graduates were leaving for other regions that we had a cultural gap in our city," Woline says. "We wanted to find a way to keep those young people here."

So the competition was launched, starting with a field of 12 job candidates who hoped to hear the phrase "You're hired" by Allied Insurance - A Nationwide Co., The Des Moines Register, Principal Financial Group or Wells Fargo.

Monica Friedman, human resources director for Allied Insurance, thinks this competition has been invaluable to her company.

"This generation of students isn't as concerned with employment opportunities as they are with finding a good place to live," she said. "That's different from previous generations. They choose a city first and then expect to find a job there."

That has caused her to change her hiring philosophy. Companies now have to sell a lifestyle as much as career opportunities.

"We have to do a better job of selling what our region has to offer," Friedman said "We always knew that was important, but now we are really putting a focus on it.

"And, we now see students who say they didn't realize that a city like Des Moines has all this downtown housing, a vibrant social life for young adults and more walking and hiking trails than any city in the United States. We've had to add this into our recruitment process."

Friedman says her company has had the chance to interview each of the 12 college students and how is watching them as they complete exercises to show why they should be hired.

"We are getting a chance to see if what we thought about them in the interview process is true," she said. "We're looking at their leadership skills, their strengths and how they capitalize on them and how they compensate for their weaknesses.

"You don't normally get to witness this in the hiring practice. We're learning a lot more about these people than we did before."

And, she says, Allied Insurance probably will make job offers to more than one of the students in the competition.

The competition has changed the way at least one students is looking at his future. Benton Hendrix, who left Colorado to attend Drake University in Des Moines, figured he would head back to Colorado after his May graduation. Now, participation in the hiring campaign has him thinking.

"Now I'm not so sure about that," he said. "Knowing that there are all these people who are enough about their community to try and make it better really says something about the place. It makes you want to stay and be part of that."

© Copley News Service
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published March 06, 2006

( 6 votes, average: 3.9 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.

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