Survey outlines NEO wages

By RICHARD L. BOCCIA

Some 419 Northeast Ohio businesses participated in the survey.

YOUNGSTOWN — To woo a business, talk about improving it’s bottom line.

That’s the persuasion a Northeast Ohio development group is trying, and a new report on starting wages and benefits in the region is its latest enticement to companies.

Rather than finding the average wage for a job, the group looked at the wages of new hires, which businesses need to know when deciding whether to move into the area.

For the survey, Team Northeast Ohio worked with 14 other Northeast Ohio economic development organizations including the Columbiana County Port Authority and the Regional Chamber.

Northeast Ohio is defined by the survey as the following 16 counties: Ashland, Ashtabula, Carroll, Columbiana, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Mahoning, Medina, Portage, Richland, Stark, Summit, Trumbull and Wayne.

Team NEO compiled numbers from 419 surveyed businesses to paint a picture of start-up staffing costs. Eighty-eight percent of respondents reported that have a primary place of business in Northeast Ohio.

The Cleveland group that did the research says it has used the numbers in attempts to market Northeast Ohio to a European manufacturer thinking of setting up shop in the region.

In a conference call earlier this week to review the data, Team NEO said average wage figures previously available were misleadingly high to businesses considering opening a location in the region.

Jim Robey, vice president of research for Team NEO, said workers in Northeast Ohio tend to keep their jobs, earning raises along the way that skew the average wage for their occupations. The survey shows starting wages to be lower than long-term wages for some jobs.

Robey said Team NEO and its research partners, which included Kent State University’s Stark Campus, decided to attract specific industries to the region, and so the survey focused on wage and benefit information for 218 occupations critical to those industries.

Some industries left out were retail and personal services such as nannies and barber shops because they don’t export goods and services, Robey said in the conference call.

Rather, they focused on the industries that the region has the best chance of attracting, based on input from the research partners.

Starting with average wages from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, the researchers made a comparison with the starting wages found by the survey.

Team NEO reports a starting wage of $90,000 for general and operations managers in Northeast Ohio, compared with the regional average of $105,000 from the JFS.

Production planning and expediting clerk is another job where Team NEO reports a significant difference between starting wage at $26,000 and the average of $44,000.

Robey said another question businesses ask when looking for the perfect match in a new location might be what’s the market for vacation time for a beginning employee?

He added that without this kind of study, there’s no way to know.

The survey found that workers who’d had their jobs for less than a year averaged 7.7 vacation days, ramping up to an average of 17 days for those who’d kept the job for 11 or more years.

The survey also asked how companies recruit employees. Respondents said they used newspapers the most in recruiting both entry-level and nonentry-level employees.