Town of Mooresville Hosts Successful Annual Career Fair In Collaboration With NCWorks
Town of Mooresville is a thriving community of more than 50,000 people nicely situated on the banks of Lake Norman. Located in the Southwest corner of Iredell County and approximately 25 miles North of Charlotte, the town continues to attract businesses and residents for its seemingly perfect pace of life, projected growth, and easily accessible highways and interstates. As the town has grown, so has the government that guides it and provides the expected protections and amenities so many take for granted. The Town of Mooresville currently boasts 558 full-time employees and approximately 61 vacancies, many of which are positions that were newly created for fiscal year 2025. Maintaining a steady, satisfied workforce and filling new positions as they become available seems like a most daunting task, yet Tiffany Shelley, Town of Mooresville’s Human Resources Director, accomplishes the task by positioning and ensuring the town as a most desirable employer, forging strategic partnerships, and meeting potential employees where they are.
Careers fairs play a significant role in Shelley’s recruitment efforts, and on June 18 the Town of Mooresville hosted their annual career fair at the Charles Mack Center where they welcomed more than 250 attendees. “We were blown away by the response,” Shelley admits. “It was phenomenal and our best one yet.”
“Our main focus in holding this career fair was to promote the various departments with the town and our current employment opportunities,” she shares. “Our budget for FY24-25 was recently adopted, so we’re actively recruiting for a number of positions available in departments from finance to our water resources to traffic & transportation, to building & permitting to administrative support.”
Jens Schmidt, Career Center Leader for NCWorks in Mooresville, feels there is a big advantage for attendees with the structure of this career fair. He explains, “The specialty of this career fair is that all the departments come out. Team members from every department are there, and they can really answer questions, like, ‘What does it mean working for the streets department? Or the water department?’ Attendees can ask, ‘What do you do all day?’”
While the Town of Mooresville and NCWorks enjoy a long history of successful career fairs, this year, they invited other local employers to join. “This year the town said they would like to expand to include other employers from the community,” Schmidt says. “We reached out to the employer contacts we have. By bringing in additional employers, they turned the annual Town of Mooresville Career Fair into a community career fair.”
Vendors such as Allegiance Staffing, Budd Group, Chick-fil-A, Costco, Express Professionals, First Bank, Pactiv Evergreen, Iredell Veteran Services, Mooresville Graded School District, Mitchell Community College, and SCN Bestco as well as NCWorks were on hand and eager to share their opportunities. “Each of the employers were very excited and pleased with the outcome of the event,” Shelley says. “The folks who showed up were ready to put their best foot forward and were eagerly awaiting their next job opportunity.”
“We saw a lot of the candidates we had shared the job fair with,” Schmidt adds. “We’re still working out of the community at the Mooresville Library and the Christian Mission three afternoons a week, and we see folks there we otherwise wouldn’t see. We told Christian Mission clientele about this career fair, and many of them showed up.”
Despite the success of the Town of Mooresville’s annual career fair, one event a year is not enough to maintain the stable workforce necessary to serve the needs of a growing town. “We have what we call popup job fairs throughout the community,” Shelley explains. “So, we might have one at FeedNC which we’ve done a couple of times. We’ve also hosted them at Alino’s or Barcelona as well as the library. We do those quite frequently throughout the year.”
Wherever these job fairs pop up, NCWorks is there as well. “Whenever the Town of Mooresville does a recruitment fair, we do it with them,” Schmidt shares. “We had one in May as an opening act for our new career center at Carpenter Avenue. We had approximately 40 applicants show up which is a real record.”
He continues, “Also, we work with the Town of Mooresville with our On-The-Job-Training program. We have that behind-the-scenes perspective, so we can share what experiences we have through our On-The-Job-Training candidates in various departments.”
On-The-Job-Training is one of the tools the Town of Mooresville uses to ensure and maintain a qualified skilled workforce. “We provide on-the-job-training for most of our positions,” Shelley says. “We partner with NCWorks to do on-the-job-training for some of our entry level positions. NCWorks has an on-the-job-training program to provide someone with several weeks of training. So far, it has always worked out well. We have promoted a couple of the folks who started in the program.”
Schmidt explains, “The purpose of the program is to provide an incentive to employers to give candidates a chance that they would otherwise not consider because there is a significant gap between the profile of the candidate and the profile of the position. NCWorks jumps in and reimburses 50% of the pay for employee for three to six months if an employer agrees to train a person on the job and give them the extra training to get them up to where they need them to be.”
On-the-job training, however, is just one of the investments the Town of Mooresville makes in their growing workforce, making them a most desirable place to work. Shelley shares, “The Town of Mooresville is an employer that invests in their employees whether that is the best equipment, a flexible work schedule, great benefits, training opportunities, and advancement opportunities. We invest in our employees all the way around, in every aspect, and we want them to have the best and be the best they can be so that we can serve our residents in the best way possible.”
“We have noticed from following it the last 5 years, the Town of Mooresville has developed a fantastic reputation and has become a really attractive employer to a growing number of people in Iredell County,” Schmidt adds. “In the last few years, they’ve done labor market studies and revamped their whole pay system. They’ve introduced a fantastic career perspective in every department which is especially nice for the on-the-job-training candidates who come from other areas and need job security and benefits.”
The Town of Mooresville continues to grow and evolve both as a community and an employer, and as more people choose it as the best place to live, they also choose it as a great place to work.
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