Five reports, one labor market.
The quarterly workforce meeting runs the same way in most regions. Twelve people around a table, most of whom like each other.
The chamberIts read comes from member conversations: two manufacturers cannot find machinists, the hospital system is short on nurses, a large employer has quietly stopped backfilling. Useful, and entirely anecdotal.
The workforce boardSurvey numbers. The response rate was thin and the fieldwork closed almost a year ago, but it is the only thing in the room with a denominator, so it wins the argument by default.
The EDOIts picture is shaped by who calls: site selectors, a manufacturer weighing a second shift, a developer scouting for a data center. Accurate about the top of the market and quiet about everything underneath it.
The community collegeA curriculum decision is due in three weeks on whether to expand industrial maintenance. It is working from its employer advisory board, which is to say from the dozen employers who have time to sit on advisory boards.
The universityIt tracks its graduates for six months after commencement, then loses them.
Five organizations, five partial pictures, five numbers that do not reconcile. The meeting ends the way it usually does, with everyone agreeing that talent is the region's biggest constraint and nobody able to say by how much, in which occupations, at which employers, this quarter.
That was survivable when the labor market moved in years. It now moves in quarters. Manufacturing investment has reshuffled which regions are hiring and which are absorbing a slowdown, with factory construction spending well off its 2024 peak while several non-electronics sectors keep climbing. Data center construction has created concentrated, sudden demand for electricians, controls technicians and site operators in places that were not planning for it. Skilled trades demand keeps climbing against a shrinking bench. And AI is rewriting the content of existing roles faster than any curriculum committee meets.
Your region probably does not have a talent shortage in the way the phrase is usually meant. It has four partial pictures of the same labor market and nobody who owns the whole one. That second problem is solvable, and solving it is worth more than another attraction campaign.
The organization that can see demand and supply at the same time, live, becomes the one the region turns to on workforce questions. That standing is different from convening a committee. It is available to the chamber or EDO that wants it, because the employers are already in the room.
Three problems worth naming, five things the data says about regions like yours, six traps that catch good teams, and a ninety-day sequence a two-person shop can run.
The big three.
Four partial pictures, no shared scoreboard.
Regional workforce effort is coordinated at the relationship level and fragmented at the data level. The chamber, the EDO, the workforce board, the college and the university are all in the room. They serve on each other's committees. They co-sign letters. And they do not agree on the number.
That fragmentation is expensive in two specific ways. Strategy meetings become negotiations over whose data is right, which consumes the hour that was supposed to produce a decision. And joint funding applications come out weaker than the coalition deserves, because a group that cannot state its own labor market cannot state its own gap, and a reviewer reading four different demand estimates in one application draws the obvious conclusion.
Most regions have the partnerships, some of them decades old and genuinely warm. What they lack is an owner. No single organization is accountable for producing the composite picture, so no one produces it. Everyone assumes someone else holds the real numbers, and everyone is right that they do not.
Ownership is also where regional politics quietly does its damage. At a chambers conference this summer, a talent lead at a four-person chamber serving roughly 350 member companies described a relationship with her regional EDO that she called contentious. Both organizations were working on talent attraction. Neither was working from the other's numbers. She was, she said, willing to take a shared regional talent map and bring it to her EDO counterpart, which is a fair summary of where a lot of regions sit: the appetite for one picture is there, and the artifact that would make the conversation concrete is not.
What she wanted was an object both organizations could argue with. Another committee was never going to produce one.
The market moves faster than the measurement.
Program design, grant applications and curriculum decisions run on survey cycles and federal data releases measured in quarters and years. Employer demand moves in weeks. So regions fund programs against a labor market that has already changed, and then spend the following year defending outcomes that were determined by a timing mismatch nobody controlled.
The mismatch plays out like this. A community college decides in the spring to expand a program. The curriculum works its way through approval over the following year. The first cohort enrolls fifteen months after the decision and graduates two years after that. The employer demand that justified the whole thing was measured in a survey fielded the winter before the decision. By the time anyone can be hired out of that program, the demand signal underneath it is close to four years old, and nobody in the chain did anything wrong.
The tools sold to close that gap mostly do not. A labor market data subscription, which for a mid-sized chamber or EDO can run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year, produces a well-designed report on a quarterly cadence. It tells you what the market looked like. It does not tell you who to call. That distinction is the whole difference between a research product and an operating capability, and it is worth being blunt about, because the report is easier to buy and easier to defend in a budget review. Nobody has ever been criticized in a board meeting for subscribing to the industry standard.
Accountability for outcomes, with no way to reach a person.
Chambers answer to members. EDOs answer to funders and boards. Both are increasingly asked to show talent outcomes in the language of placements, retention and employers served. Neither is a recruiter, and neither wants to become one. The toolkit most of them are handed is place marketing: campaigns, ads, "why move here" content, a video with drone footage of the riverfront. All of it measured in impressions.
The resourcing has not followed the expectation. City Nation Place's 2026 global survey received 98 complete responses. Among respondents whose organizations treat talent attraction as one area of focus, 54 percent received no separate or additional funding for it. Across respondents, average confidence in measuring the effective economic impact of leveraging the place brand to attract talent was six out of ten. Six out of ten is hope with a number attached.
A second pressure comes from the president's office. Members are asking chambers for talent help they cannot build themselves, and a chamber that can answer that ask has a membership benefit and, in some cases, a non-dues revenue line. A chamber that cannot answer it has a renewal conversation that gets harder every year. So the talent lead is being asked to produce recruiter-grade outcomes with a marketer's toolkit, on behalf of employers who will judge the result the way they judge an agency.
Meanwhile the highest-yield talent stays invisible. The people most likely to move to a region, or stay in it, are the ones who already have ties to it: alumni, boomerangs, graduating students, trailing spouses, people who left for a bigger city and now have a mortgage rate and a second kid and a reason to reconsider. A keyword ad cannot find those people. Data can, at the individual level, by name.
Those three problems are the same problem seen from three chairs. Nobody owns the picture, the picture ages faster than the decisions built on it, and without a picture there is no way to reach a specific person or prove you did.
"Every chamber is asked the same question: can you help us find people? And the truth is, if you're a team of one or two, you probably can't do that manually."
Brianna Mosier, Executive Director of Education and Talent, Flint & Genesee
Explore your current regional talent pool
A Regional Talent Blueprint runs your feeder mix, concentration, flow and ties-based pool against your actual member employers.
Five things the data says about regions like yours.
A note on evidence
The patterns below come from the Regional Talent Blueprints Findem has run for chambers and EDOs across the US and internationally. Federal and public data sits underneath as denominator and cross-check. Everyone already has the federal data; it is not the part that is missing.
Three caveats travel with every blueprint figure. The talent pool is a professional digital footprint, not the labor force: it counts digitally visible profiles in a radius, including people who are retired, studying, or not working, across a wider geography than the federal metro definition. Talent flow is read through a single anchor employer and represents that employer's sector rather than the whole market. And job index location filters are noisy, so demand counts are directional. Use them for shares and structure. Do not read them as census counts.
Most regions built their own workforce, and then let it walk.
Leaders describe their workforce as something the region competes for. The education data describes it as something the region produced, then failed to keep.
The first thing a blueprint settles is whether a region imports its workforce or grows it. In the regions we have mapped, it mostly grows it. The top five feeder institutions come back dominated by in-state schools, and the regional community college contributes more than the strategy documents suggest.
IPEDS completions data for the institutions in question, plus any state post-graduation retention study your state agency publishes.
If the people working in your region mostly came from your region, retention is your first lever and attraction is your second. Retention is also the cheaper one, and it compounds: a graduate who stays five years becomes a mid-career professional you never had to recruit.
Name your top five feeder institutions from memory, then check the real list. Pay attention to whether a community college shows up on the second list and not the first. The gap between what a team remembers and what the data holds is usually where the strategy has drifted.
Brain drain is usually the wrong diagnosis. Your people are recirculating.
Expect resistance on this one. Plenty of regional funding narratives have brain drain written into paragraph two.
Flow analysis repeatedly shows that people leaving a region's anchor employer largely land at other employers in the same region. They move across the street. That is churn, and churn takes different remedies from leakage.
When we trace where people go after leaving a region's anchor employer, the destination list is dominated by other employers in the same region. It comes back that way often enough that we now treat a leakage claim as something to check rather than something to accept.
Census county-to-county migration flows for the same metro will show you whether people are physically leaving the county at the rate the local narrative assumes. Usually they are not.
Recirculation makes this a question of employer competitiveness. Place attractiveness is a marketing budget. Employer competitiveness is a conversation with your members about pay bands, career paths and why the same forty people keep rotating between the same six companies.
It also changes what a grant application should ask for. "Our region is losing its graduates" is a familiar claim reviewers have read a hundred times. "Our region retains its people and cycles them through six employers who are bidding against each other for the same bench" is a specific, defensible diagnosis, and it points at a different intervention.
Handle the reframe with care internally. Nobody was wrong; the diagnosis just got sharper.
Ask your largest employer's HR leader where their last twenty departures went. They will know, and their answer is the fastest version of this analysis available to you.
Your concentration number is a site selection asset, and most regions have never computed it.
One number: the largest employer's share of the region's professional talent pool.
A low maximum share is a resilience story, and a site selector will pause on it, because it says the region can absorb a new employer without one company's downturn taking the labor market with it. A high maximum share is a dependency risk. Quantified, it can be planned against and funded against. Unquantified, it just sits there.
We compute this in every blueprint, and it is usually new information to the region. The spread between the most concentrated and most diversified regions we have mapped is wide, and it does not track region size the way people expect. Plenty of small regions are diversified and plenty of large ones lean on a single employer.
BLS metro area employment data for sector concentration, alongside your state's major-employer filings.
Talent availability is one of the deciding factors in where relocating and expanding companies land. Most regional pitches assert it. Very few quantify it. A concentration figure with a real denominator goes straight into the site selection conversation and does work that a lifestyle video cannot.
Can you state, right now, what share of your region's professional workforce sits inside your single largest employer? If it takes more than a day to produce, you have your answer.
The gap that decides your next big employer is the skill you neither demand nor supply.
Comparing hiring demand against a region's skill profile, the interesting gap is almost never the unfilled requisitions. Unfilled reqs are visible, and employers are already working on them.
The gap that matters is the specialized capability the region neither posts for nor holds. It is absent from the demand side because the employers who would need it have not seriously considered the region, and absent from the supply side because nobody has trained for work that is not there. It reads as empty space in the data, which is why nobody looks at it.
Read a region's hiring demand against its skill profile and the same kinds of gaps recur: specialized engineering, advanced manufacturing and technical disciplines that are missing on both sides of the ledger at once. No employer is posting for them, so no one is training for them, so no employer arrives.
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for your metro, read against the same occupations nationally and in the two or three peer metros you compete with for projects.
Closing that gap takes years, and no tool that only counts open roles will show it to you. It is also the most useful thing to know before an employer attraction pitch. Most pitches claim the talent is there. The stronger one says: here is the bench we have, here is the gap, and here is the program already standing up to close it.
Take the last major employer prospect your region lost. Do you know which capability they could not source locally? If you know, is anyone training for it now?
Your boomerang pool is larger than your ad audience, and you can name them.
People with prior work, education or family ties to a region who now live somewhere else are findable at the individual level, and reachable directly. We ran the count for one US metro of roughly two million people, filtering to everyone with a tie to the region who had since moved out of state.
That figure is a list. Each person on it has a name, a current employer and a career history you can read before you write to them.
IPEDS alumni volumes for your region's institutions will give you a rough floor for how large a ties-based audience should be in a region your size.
Place marketing sells a region to strangers and reports back in impressions. Ties-based outreach reaches people who already have a reason to consider the move, and reports back in replies, applications and hires. The harder conversation is with a board that sees the bigger impression count and assumes it belongs to the stronger campaign. One of those campaigns ends in a list a member employer can act on. The other ends in a slide.
Ask your marketing lead for the size of your last attraction campaign's audience, then ask how many of those people have a prior tie to the region. Most of the time the second number does not exist.
"We wanted to give people a reason to stay. Or to come back. Or to make Flint their new home."
Brianna Mosier, Executive Director of Education and Talent, Flint & Genesee
See these five numbers for your own region
A Regional Talent Blueprint runs your feeder mix, concentration, flow and ties-based pool against your actual member employers.
Six traps.
Every one of these catches good teams. Most of them are seductive precisely because they look like progress.
A coalition that shares a room but not a scoreboard.
Everyone at the table, four different numbers. The room itself feels like the accomplishment, and in fairness it took years to build. Attendance is easy to report. Alignment takes a shared number.
Ask each partner, separately, how many open roles exist in your priority sector this quarter. If you get four answers, you have coordination, not alignment.
One shared read on demand and one on supply, published on a cadence every partner reads from. The chamber is usually best positioned to own it, because the employers are already in the room and the job postings are already public. Publishing beats circulating: a number that goes out on a schedule, with a method attached, becomes the regional number within about two cycles, whether or not anyone voted on it.
Buying the report instead of the capability.
A subscription that produces a well-designed quarterly PDF. It is a defensible line item, it arrives on schedule, and it makes the organization look rigorous in front of a board. It is also genuinely good research.
Name three decisions that changed because of last year's report.
Require that any data purchase ends in a list of employers or people you can contact. Research tells you the shape of the market. An operating capability tells you who to call on Tuesday. Buy the research; most regions genuinely need it. The mistake is letting the subscription stand in for the operating capability, which is what happens when both compete for the same budget line.
Mistaking the survey for the market.
An annual employer survey with a low response rate becomes "what employers need" for the next twelve months. It has a methodology, it produces a document, and it is what the previous person did.
When was your demand data collected, and what share of your member employers does it represent?
Live job posting data across member companies. Those postings are already public, they are already yours to aggregate, and they do not wait on a survey cycle or a response rate. Keep the survey for the questions postings cannot answer, which are the good ones anyway: why a role stayed open, what the employer settled for, what they would have paid.
Recruiting strangers while local talent quietly leaves.
Attraction spend is visible. Retention is invisible until the number moves. Attraction is photographable: a campaign, a booth, a billboard, a launch event. Nobody cuts a ribbon on a graduate who stayed.
Compare what you spend to attract one worker against what you spend to keep one local graduate.
Measure both, fund the cheaper one first, and use the feeder school data from Chapter 02 to know which lever you actually have. If four of your five feeder institutions are in-state, you are running an attraction program to solve a retention problem. And retention has a photograph available if you look for it, which is the employer whose mid-career bench stopped turning over.
Counting activity when your funder will eventually count placements.
Job fairs held, resumes collected, impressions delivered. Activity metrics are available today, they always go up, and no funder has asked for anything better yet. That last part changes without warning.
Can you name the last ten people who got a job because of something your organization did?
Make the placement the unit of measurement now, while you still get to define how it is counted, rather than after a funder asks and you are building the measurement under deadline. Defining it yourself matters more than defining it perfectly. An influenced placement with a written, consistently applied definition survives scrutiny. A number assembled retroactively from event sign-in sheets does not.
Leaving the workforce board and the staffing bench outside the tent.
Two of the region's real talent assets, treated as adjacent or as competition. Workforce boards feel like a different world of compliance and federal formula funding. Staffing agencies feel like vendors chasing the same business. Neither reads as a partner.
Both readings cost you. Workforce boards are state-mandated, they direct how workforce development dollars get spent across dislocated adults, the job center and youth programs, and they are staffed in part by HR leaders from the region's largest employers. That is budget and demand-side intelligence in the same room. Local staffing agencies frequently sit on those boards, want the business, and hold the frontline and skilled-trades bench that no professional dataset covers well. Their placement data is the closest thing most regions have to a live read on the part of the labor market that does not post to LinkedIn.
One line on timing: WIOA reauthorization is moving. The House Education and Workforce Committee advanced A Stronger Workforce for America Act of 2026 on a party-line vote in April 2026, and its Senate prospects are uncertain. Do not build a strategy on the outcome. Do know that your workforce board partners are watching it closely, which makes this a good quarter to be in the room with them.
Can you name the HR leaders on your local workforce board, and the three staffing firms with the deepest bench in your region?
Treat both as supply and as budget rather than as competition. Bring the staffing firms your demand data and ask what they see that you do not, which will usually be the frontline and trades market you have no visibility into. Bring the workforce board a shared read on demand and you have changed what a formula-funding conversation is working from. This is the one-house version of regional talent: chambers, workforce boards, universities, community colleges and staffing partners aligned on one set of goals and one set of numbers.
"Getro has streamlined the management of our job board and offered valuable insights into industry trends."
David Jennings, Talent Operations, Communitech
What insight leadership actually looks like.
Diagnosis is the easy half. Four layers, described as work rather than as features.
Demand
Every open role across member companies, tracked live rather than surveyed. This is aggregation, not research: the postings exist, they are public, and the work is pulling them into one place on a schedule and keeping the employer list current as members join and leave.
Supply
A map of the region's professional workforce at the individual level, refreshed continuously rather than assembled for a report. Who is here, what they can do, where they came from, who employs them.
The market map
The two side by side, so the gap is visible instead of debated. This is the artifact the quarterly meeting has been missing. It is also the artifact that goes into a grant application and a site selection pitch without being rebuilt each time.
Activation
Reaching real people with the region's story, and tracking whether they landed a job. The output of this layer is a placement count, which is a different kind of number from an impression count and answers a different question at the board meeting.
Then the part most of this audience has not worked out, which is ownership. Four layers with no owner produce the same four partial pictures in a new format.
| Owner | Layer | Why them |
|---|---|---|
| Chamber | Demand | It holds the employer relationships, and the membership roster is the employer list. |
| Workforce board | Funding case | It already directs the money and sits closest to the federal reporting. |
| College & university | Program response | The only partners who can change what the region supplies. |
| EDO | External pitch | Site selectors call the EDO. |
That division answers the question sitting underneath the whole problem. Nobody produces the composite picture because composite pictures need a named owner per layer and a single shared source beneath them.
Two things are where this usually goes wrong. First, owning a layer does not mean owning it exclusively. The EDO still cares about demand and the chamber still cares about the external pitch. Ownership means one organization is accountable for keeping the layer current and correct, and everyone else gets to use it without rebuilding it. Second, the layers have to be genuinely shared, not exchanged. A quarterly export emailed between partners is the four-pictures problem with better manners. When the college updates a program response, the chamber should see the same map the following week.
None of this requires a new entity, and regions that try to build one usually spend a year on bylaws. It requires one organization to start producing a layer well enough that the others stop producing their own.
Where Findem fits is narrow. The operating model carries the argument here; the software just does the work. Findem aggregates live hiring demand across member companies, maps the region's professional supply at the individual level using 3D data, surfaces the people with real ties to the region through Relationship Signals, and tracks outreach through to placement. That is talent intelligence pointed at regional outcomes rather than at a recruiter's requisition load. The scoreboard it feeds is yours: net migration, employer attraction, workforce readiness, grant outcomes.
"We're not a staffing agency. Our goal is to make warm introductions between job seekers and employers, and to support the whole person in making the decision to stay, return, or relocate here."
Brianna Mosier, Executive Director of Education and Talent, Flint & Genesee
The first 90 days.
Five moves, ordered by leverage, written so a two-person talent team can start Monday. Nothing here needs a new hire, a new entity or a board resolution.
Run the four-partner test and write down the four answers
Ask the chamber, the EDO, the workforce board and the college the same question about your priority sector this quarter, separately, and record what comes back. The spread is your baseline, and it is the most persuasive slide you will build all year.
Employer engagementAggregate live demand across your member employers
The fastest visible win in the sequence. The postings are public, the aggregation is mechanical, and the output doubles as member value: employers see their roles in front of regional talent, and you see your own labor market for the first time.
Employer engagementGet your region's supply picture
Two numbers do most of the work: the largest employer's share of the professional pool, and how many of your top five feeder institutions are in-state. Both go straight into the site selection pitch and the next grant application.
Workforce developmentPick one lever and fund it properly
Retention or attraction, decided by what steps 2 and 3 tell you rather than by what is easier to photograph. Splitting a small budget across both is how regions end up unable to demonstrate either.
Retention or attractionInstrument placements from day one
Define what counts as a placement your organization influenced, and start counting before anyone asks. Retrofitting attribution is far harder than establishing it. Start narrow if you have to: ten placements you can name and trace are worth more than four hundred you have to estimate.
Workforce developmentRun in that order and the ninety days end with something you did not have at the start: a demand read nobody disputes, two supply numbers that go straight into your next pitch, one funded lever chosen on evidence, and a placement count that grows from here.
Start with step three
The supply picture is the one move you cannot do with a spreadsheet and a Friday afternoon. We build it for your region.
The region that can see itself.
Most regions have the partnerships. Most have the goodwill. What is missing is a shared picture, and the standing that comes with owning one.
The organization that can see demand and supply at the same time sets the agenda for everyone else in the region. Its numbers become the numbers in the grant application. Its read becomes the read in the site selection pitch. Its meeting becomes the meeting where things get decided.
In most regions that role is unclaimed. It is claimable in a quarter, and the chamber or EDO that wants it has an advantage nobody else in the room has, which is that the employers already take its calls.
Get your region's talent map
Tell us your region and we will build it.
A Regional Talent Blueprint runs your feeder mix, concentration, flow and ties-based pool against your actual member employers. We will walk you through it.
Prefer to book directly? Request your talent map here.
Sources
- IoT Analytics, US manufacturing reshoring boom: what the data says, May 2026, analysing US Census Value of Construction Put in Place data.
- City Nation Place, place-led approaches to successful talent attraction and retention, 2026 global survey.
- Community College Daily, House committee approves WIOA reauthorization bill, April 2026.
- Findem Regional Talent Blueprints, observed patterns across the regions mapped to date.
- Findem Regional Talent Blueprint analysis, March 2026. Region withheld.
- Reference sets used for cross-checks: NCES IPEDS, Census ACS migration flows, BLS State and Metro Area Employment, BLS OEWS, Brookings Metro Monitor 2026.
- Customer quotes: Flint & Genesee Education & Talent customer story and the Getro for economic development organizations page.