Bob Funk's Take: What is the impact of the new Tax Reform Plan on the Nation's employee mark

I was recently invited to join Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney on his national program “Varney & Co.” to discuss whether or not the improving economy is a reaction to President Trump’s policies. It was a great conversation that led us to some predictions about the employee markets in 2018.

There should be nothing more important to a successful company than the employees in that company. I believe an organization is only as strong as its employees. They are our treasures of the future and we want to reward their hard work, skills sets and loyalty.

When President Trump’s tax reform plan passed, we applauded this action and also felt it our obligation as a good employer to share those extra funds as extra cash to our people. At Express Employment Professionals we gave each of our non-executive employees a bonus of $2,000 in January. This is in addition to a $1,000 bonus plus profit sharing bonuses given in December of last year. We are expecting extremely good things from this economy in 2018 and we hope the employment environment will allow us to continue to monetarily reward our employees.

I give President Trump the credit for this positive economy we are seeing. We saw the gates of employment open fairly wide when the President was elected, but with the passage of the new tax reform plan we are seeing job orders flowing in like we haven’t seen in many years. We have as many as 20,000 open job orders each month, and as always we are eager to go about the business of filling those jobs with qualified employees.

The labor force participation rate has remained flat for too long. We anticipate a continued recruiting crunch as this jobs economy improves over the next six to nine months. The creation of new jobs due to tax breaks for employers is just increasing the need for qualified workers even more. We've been sounding the alarm for the past five years about the demand for skilled workers.

To meet the demand, we need to turn unemployed people and workers on the sidelines into qualified workers. That means we will expect solid values from our employees, a strong work ethic and for them to be trainable with both soft skills and hard skills alike.

American companies are ready to pay quality skilled workers. Companies will have to invest in training new workers and unskilled workers will need to seek out ways to get new skills. It's time to get to work America.