Columbia Standard

Nephron Pharmaceuticals in Lexington County has shown that hiring can be successfully accomplished even in an environment where other South Carolina employers are complaining about staffing shortages.

“We’ve onboarded so many people, I just bought another bus to get people from the parking lot to the employee entrance. We’ve ramped (up) from 20,000 kits on the first day to 2 million at the end of the first month. We onboarded 1,600 people in the last five weeks with people of all ages, of all shapes and sizes. I think that is remarkable, given the employment challenges of the whole country and South Carolina,” Nephron CEO Lou Kennedy said, according to Nephron's website.

Nephron has hired 1,600 part-time employees to add to its full-time workforce of 1,200 and 800 part-timers in an effort to produce 30 million vials of reagents used in COVID-19 kits, as well as assembling millions of COVID-19 test kits sold in pharmacies.

The South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce announced the state has more people employed than in any time in its history, which also means an unusually low unemployment rate of 3.7%.

Nephron attracted college students with part-time, flexible hours and contests to see who could make the highest number of kits. They reached out to local high schools and helped kids write resumes. They mined talent from area baseball, basketball, cheerleading and other sports teams. They posted flyers in elevators. They asked people who already worked part-time at Nephron to spread the word in houses of worship and community groups to people who might want to work just a few hours a day to make a little extra holiday cash.

“Then they get caught up in the fun and competition of it and, all of a sudden, they’re bringing five or 10 of their friends,” Kennedy said. “It’s been a real grassroots effort.”