TIFTON — In the nine years that Amanda Brack has been working for local staffing agency Quality Employment Services, she has never seen the volume of job openings as she has been seeing since COVID-19 reached the United States.

“Our total of job openings has nearly doubled since the onset of the pandemic and we are currently pushing a record high of 100 job openings here in our Tifton location alone,” Brack said. “Our Moultrie office is seeing the same trend in openings.”

Brack said that, from information she receives through industry newsletters, staffing agencies in other states are showing the same trend.

They had approximately 50 job openings when the state-wide shutdown started; now there are so many openings she doesn’t have time to organize them.

Brack usually organizes the jobs her agency is tasked with filling, but now there are so many openings coming in daily she simply doesn’t have the time.

“It changes from week to week,” she said. “Actually, it changes from day to day.”

The surge in openings isn’t targeted to a specific industry that she can see, even though many of the openings they try to fill most consistently are labor jobs.

Her agency is looking to fill everything from CLD drivers, landscapers and warehouse forklift drivers to medical assistants, administrative assistants and termite inspectors.

“We’ve been looking for a Certified Public Accountant for a while,” she said. “We’ve got openings for butchers.”

The biggest problem filling positions isn’t a lack of applicants with training, according to Brack. She said the reason there are more openings than applicants is that it’s hard to find dependable employees. Many of the businesses she works with are offering on the job training for those potential employees who are willing to simply come to work.

“That is where businesses are,” she said. “They just need people to be dependable, willing to learn and who will come in and work.”

Those that do stick with it are what Brack calls the agency’s success stories.

One of those success stories, Jonell Dean, has been at Jeff Fender Buick GMC since March and was recently switched over from being on the agency’s payroll to being on the business payroll.

Valley Eastern Region Distribution Center is another success story. The company, which is the largest irrigation equipment distributor in town, started using the agency more than 16 years ago. Out of the eight current employees at Valley, seven were hired through Quality Employment Agency.

Brack isn’t sure what the reason behind the recent local surge in job openings has been.

“You look at the unemployment numbers and while the numbers have gotten better, they’re still historic,” she said. “But the national picture isn’t always the same as the local picture. Local businesses are telling me that feel like things are good, and a lot of these places are hiring.”