America’s Thrift Stores to Hire 300 in Next 3 Months

Al.com reporter Martin J. Reed sat down with our CEO and HR Manager to learn more about America’s Thrift Stores Job Fair Road Show for the Birmingham Metro Area.

“The America’s Thrift Store chain is planning on hiring around 300 people in the next three months with a focus on getting employees for its flagship Alabaster location as well as sites in Pell City and Center Point.

The company is particularly focused on the Alabaster store due to challenges associated with finding workers amid Shelby County’s consistently low unemployment rates of less than 4 percent.

“With unemployment so low in Shelby County we struggle to find ‘local talent’ for our store in Alabaster,” America’s Thrift Store CEO Ken Sobaski said in an email.

The store serves nearly 1,000 customers daily with more than 100 workers employed at the site, Sobaski said.

“With a mission to contribute $100 million to Christian ministries over the next 10 years, we look for employees that want to be part of something bigger than just a job. But in Alabaster, that is a struggle unlike what we face in any of our 18 stores across Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana,” Sobaski said.

The America’s Thrift Store chain is hosting a job fair at its Alabaster store from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Feb. 25. The store is located in the Alabaster Shopping Center at 218 2nd Ave. Southwest.

Tyrenda Williams-Reed, human resources manager for America’s Thrift Store, said the company is doing “hyper-aggressive recruiting in communities like Alabaster because the unemployment rate is so low in Shelby County.”

“It’s a great problem to have because it shows the strength in growth for the area, but you rarely hear stories of employers not having enough candidates to choose from,” she said, noting “it is certainly a unique trend we find in our Alabaster store compared to our other 17 locations across the Southeast.”

The company plans to attend the Lawson State Community College job fair in March to actively recruit employees for its Bessemer store, “particularly on the heels of the possible US Steel layoffs in Fairfield,” Williams-Reed said.

Sobaski said the company is optimistic in its goal to hire the roughly 300 workers in the next three months. “If you think about that number, hiring 300 people in the next three months probably makes us one of Alabama’s most significant employers over that three-month period,” he said.”

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