WASHINGTON — A tech-industry downturn and a federal permission to boost worker compensation helped with hiring at U.S. nuclear-weapons labs, but hanging on to recruits is still tough, the lab directors said here Wednesday.
“We’re actually in quite a good place right now,” Kimberly Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, outside the San Francisco Bay Area, said during a panel discussion at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
Budil said the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) helped the lab “build a more attractive package” for recruits, and that the tech market in California “is a little cooler than it was just a year ago.”
The high cost of California living is still a barrier for some potential recruits, Budil said, and Livermore is still “grappling with things like hybrid work” that are not always easy to pull off in classified programs, but which during the pandemic became the standard for many job-market entrants.
These days, the labs are offering compensation that is “closer and closer to market conditions,” said James Peery, director of the Sandia National Laboratories, headquartered in Albuquerque, N.M., “but we’re still seeing people disproportionately leaving between three and seven years.”
Sandia has a small campus near Livermore, where recruits have to struggle with sometimes-prohibitive housing costs and high rent. The labs’ main campus, in New Mexico campus, has different issues, Peery said.
“Albuquerque, our attrition issues are more around schools and how good the schools are. Crime’s becoming a bigger and bigger issue in Albuquerque for us. And actually health care,” said Peery. “Things we’re trying to work on with local and state governments.”
As always, the labs directors said, getting new recruits fully plugged into the nuclear weapons program takes time. Some people choose to move on rather than wait out the process.
“[W]e’re still seeing people disproportionately leaving between three and seven years,” Peery said.
“When you’re a new hire at the lab, you don’t come in fully proficient in all the quirks and peculiarities of our line of business,” said Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., a little more than 30 miles northwest by road from Santa Fe. “[T]he last thing we want to do is have people work their way through that process, start to become proficient, and then up and leave.”
Los Alamos hired 2,500 people in 2023, Mason said, calling it a “peak year” for recruitment.
In 2024, “retention is a larger focus,” said Mason. “We still have a little bit of hiring to do in certain select areas, but we’re basically over the hump in terms of our growth.”
Mason too said “investing in our people” could increase the likelihood that they will stick in the weapons or other lab programs, but that compensation is only part of what the labs need to offer.
For example, Mason said, labs can show recruits how “you can do different things over the course of your career” at a single nuclear weapons lab. A recruit who joins the lab’s non-classified science programs early on might move to the weapons program later and into non-proliferation after that.
“If things really go south, you can always go into management,” Mason said.
