Dean Amhaus has an idea to warm up Milwaukee. He wants to move the official temperature-taking site from Mitchell International Airport.
“It’s always cooler by the lake,” explains Amhaus, Spirit of Milwaukee president, “and in spring or early summer, that can mean 12 degrees difference.” Chicago mitigates its lake effect by taking the official temp some 15 miles west of the city.
Such are the clever tactics considered to combat the notion that Milwaukee has a climate more suitable for penguins than humans. That perception has a chilling effect on attempts to recruit employees and tourists from more clement climes.
“We paint an ugly picture, along with a positive picture,” says Deborah DeCamp, Midwest regional director for Manpower Professional. “If you’re entertaining someone from Florida, for example, you can’t just sell them on, ‘Oh, the summer’s fabulous.’ It’s still going to hit them when January rolls around.”
And it will hit them immediately if you’re recruiting in January. “We don’t have the winters off,” says Sara Reed, vice president of human resources for Robert W. Baird. “We recruit year round.”
Younger people may be less wary of or may even welcome polar temperatures, says Robert Blust, Marquette University’s dean of undergraduate admissions. “They’re looking forward to the snow and cold because it’s something they haven’t experienced,” he says.
But few conventioneers look forward to snow drifts and wind chills, a reality that challenges the Greater Milwaukee Convention and Visitors Bureau. Most big conventions flock to year-round warm spots like Orlando and Austin. “All upper Midwest cities face these same challenges,” says PR Director David Fantle. “But compare our winters with 110 degrees for six months straight. In some ways, Phoenix is far less desirable than our change of seasons.” When conventions do come here, they seek winter fun or indoor cultural events, Fantle notes.
Employment recruiters may have better luck with those who’ve lived in cold-weather places, which makes the vetting of candidates important.
But for highly technical or arcane jobs, where the applicant pool is sparse, it may not be possible to target only veterans of the American tundra. That’s when recruiters start wheedling and placating, when cold-weather euphemisms (i.e., “seasonality”) are dispatched.
Recruiters also promote the positive side of ice and snow. Jo Ann Ratcheson, director of physician relations for Columbia St. Mary’s, sells the ice-skating, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing to out-of-state doctors. Dr. Michael Lischak left the interminably summery island of Oahu to take over Columbia St. Mary’s CorporateWORx program. “You get used to the rhythms of life, of seasons, and Hawaii doesn’t have that,” he says.
But even if the change of seasons intrigues a prospect, it may turn off a family member. “If a spouse – or even an aging parent – has a health issue and wouldn’t be comfortable in a cold climate, then maybe we’re not the right fit,” says Ratcheson. To help seal the deal, she may help find a job for a prospective employee’s spouse. She also keeps in touch with the physicians and their families after they make the move, introducing them to such things as all-season radial tires.
If recruiters are lucky, they’ll find someone like Alan Kirshbom, general manager of WMYX, KISS and Sports Radio 1250, who had no problem moving from New Orleans in January, but his wife had snow jitters. “The trick is to relocate in June,” he says. “By the time she realized it would get really cold and start snowing, it was too late. I had already changed her mailing address.”
