HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — In this year’s State of the City address, Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said one of the greatest challenges facing the city is a shortage of workers. Huntsville leaders are working to fix that through a 1 million dollar campaign.

The City of Huntsville is contributing one million dollars to the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce for a digital “smart place to live” campaign in hopes of attracting workers to the area.

“The jobs that are sitting right here and we are still waiting to fill. You could talk to Toyota Motor Manufacturer, talk Mazda Toyota, or talk to Polaris they’re all looking for workers [who] are looking for people to fill those jobs,” says Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle.

The money will be split between two companies that will do two campaigns.

“One that is doing the North Alabama campaign, and one that is doing the national campaign,” said Lucia Cape, a senior vice president with the chamber.

The chamber hopes to drive potential employees to the chamber’s recruitment website asmartplace.com.

“What they are doing for us is managed social media on all of our smart place platforms,” Cape said. “They are also doing paid ads on those platforms and they are doing digital advertising in certain markets, cities, and metro areas across the country with the kinds of workers that we want to attract.”

And they are using targeted ads to attract people to live and work in the city.

“Geo-targeted to conferences to conferences that we attend or that we host here in Huntsville so we get the attention of people coming to Huntsville for things like the space and missile defense conference or the cyber summit,” says Cape.

Those workers are most needed for manufacturing as well as aerospace and defense.
and the recruiting efforts won’t just focus on out-of-towners, but also homegrown talent.

“We have one in north Alabama campaign targeting recent high school graduates, who are maybe in their late teens or early 20s who maybe don’t have a career plan. and then we have the national campaign targeting all ages across the skillsets that our employers have said they need to hire,” says Cape.