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In N.D., the Road to Economic Recovery

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Job Seeker Drawn to North Dakota
After five months of fruitless job searching, Ohio-resident Janet Morgan found work in a place she never intended: North Dakota.
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Morgan accepted immediately, desperate for the cash and open to adventure. But on the long drive — as cities gave way to towns, towns gave way to farms, and farms gave way to a vast expanse of nothingness — she started to wonder whether she had made the wrong decision. Where would she live? Why wasn’t her cellphone getting service? Would she find a bowling league to join? Would her children ever travel this far to visit her?

This Story
Fallout: Open Space, Open Jobs: In N.D., the Road to Economic Recovery
Job Seeker Drawn to North Dakota
Fallout: Coping With Recession
She had a job and nothing else.

“I’m half-tempted to call this all a big mistake and turn around,” she said.

But she kept driving until finally, at 6:45 a.m. Monday, she arrived in Bismarck and parked her truck in front of a red brick building adjacent to a Super Wal-Mart. She changed into a fancy blouse and black sneakers and reported to work. In a training session, she learned how to answer phone calls from people who had dialed 1-800 numbers to complain about their cereal. Inside her cubicle, one of dozens set in identical rows, she found a sterilized phone that rang with calls from California, Michigan and Ohio.

Anything Is Possible

While Morgan continued her shift, Sarah Johnson sat in her office across downtown Bismarck and sifted through one of the stacks of résumés piled on her desk. North Dakota’s talent recruiter, Johnson, 29, had become one of the state’s most ardent saleswomen. She grew up in Bismarck, moved away to Minneapolis, tired of the big city and returned home. What others considered North Dakota’s flaws, she regarded only as assets. Cold winters made you appreciate dry, beautiful summers. Quietude sometimes allowed you to hear the distant howl of coyotes at night.

In corresponding with dozens of out-of-state job-seekers each day, Morgan repeated her favorite statistics: The state’s economy grew by 7.3 percent in 2008. It ranks second to last in housing foreclosures and third to last in average credit card debt. Mining, construction and agriculture all recently surged by at least 10 percent. The government just passed $400 million in tax cuts.

Best of all were the 9,000 jobs — a number made even more significant in a state where the population barely exceeds 640,000. Johnson had taken to answering most job queries with a variation of the same response: “In North Dakota,” she said, “it is pretty much possible to do anything, anywhere.”

She opened her e-mail to find the latest barrage of requests from the country’s unemployed. A roughneck from Utah wanted an oil job near Williston, population 13,000, and Johnson replied with 57 openings. A banker from Washington state was hoping for a position in accounting, and Johnson sent along 500 possibilities. “There are more,” she wrote, “but the search engine stops after it gets this many.”

As she worked, Johnson continually updated a list of more than 1,000 people currently interested in moving to North Dakota — a list that recently had grown by a few hundred names each week. She sent tourism booklets to each person who contacted her, encouraging them to “experience North Dakota,” but lately it seemed job-seekers were more apt to recruit her. Some called six times each week. Others took vacations to Bismarck and stopped by her office.

But mostly, they e-mailed — an unyielding flood of communication that totaled 100 notes per day, each more desperate than the last.

“I need to know what options there are for people trying to start a new life with little to no money,” wrote an unemployed construction worker from Wisconsin.

Johnson wheeled her chair back from her desk and spoke her answer aloud. “Well,” she said, “you’ve come to the right place.”

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