Job Offers Rising
The weekend WSJ reports on a positive economic development that might surprise some people: The increasing number of job offers:
“As the economy gradually recovers, some big U.S. companies are cranking up their recruiting and advertising thousands of job openings, ranging from retail clerks and nurses to bank tellers and experts in cloud computing.
Many of the new jobs are in retailing, accounting, consulting, health care, telecommunications and defense-related industries, according to data collected for The Wall Street Journal by Indeed Inc., which runs one the largest employment websites. It said the number of U.S. job postings on the Internet rose to 4.7 million on Dec. 1, up from 2.7 million a year earlier. The company daily collects listings from corporate and job-posting websites, removing duplicates. Its figures may undercount available jobs because some companies don’t post all listings online, an Indeed spokesman said.”
To be sure, the employment losses in the 2008-09 recession were much worse than previous contractions. The WSJ adds that “official payroll data so far haven’t shown signs of a big rebound in hiring.”
Online job posts tend to be light on Farming, manufacturing and construction jobs, and heavy on computer and mathematical jobs. The key for many of the available jobs is technical expertise; they are tghe jobs that are the most plentiful and have the fewest number of applicants per opening.
Other positives for the job market include:
• Government data shows a rising trend in openings. October 2010 had 3.2 million private-sector job openings versus 2.3 million from October 2009 (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
• Companies have become highly profitable and have built strong cash positions;
• Consumer confidence appears to be reviving; 2010 was the best holiday for retailers in 4 years;
• The economy should continue recovery gradually — and that will encourage more companies to hire
Companies that are currently hiring include Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, AT&T, WellPoint, Science Applications International, Catholic Health Initiatives, Wells Fargo, and Lockheed Martin.
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Source:
Job Offers Rising as Economy Warms Up
JAMES R. HAGERTY And JOE LIGHT
WSJ, DECEMBER 24, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703548604576037612752480904.html
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December 26th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
I live in San Francisco, the job market for computer types is on fire! There is a mini dot com boom here. Salesforce just bought a campus for their HQ in downtown SF that will put a floor under San Fran employment. Twitter, Zynga, google, facebook etc. There is also lots of biotech here now. If things do the normal cycle of boom bust it could end in a couple years. It is still tough finding work outside tech tho. Of course San Fran should be hot, its the center of the tech universe. But does a tech heavy recovery mean much as Computer tech can drop very quickly. I still get concerned about Structural unemployment due to automation and offshoring. Part of the reason for high profits is companies are automating more and hiring less people. Is cloud computing (and social networking) the engine of this recovery? does the cloud have legs? Is that meaningful work, in the cloud? cloud work by definition is sort of location-less, so it could be offshored easily. Google hires humans but certainly automates tons of stuff, that is their business, to put humans out of work. All Hail our Benevolent Overlord, Google!
December 26th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
100% of stimulus has been spent & committed as of 12/31 and state & local layoffs are going full bore offsetting this private hiring and gov jobs pay a lot more than private jobs according to some studies.
Seemed to be more discretionary spending this Christmas season, good thing this east coast blizzard didn’t happen last week
December 26th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Job offers rising?
JOB OFFERS?????
Job offers as in “sign on the line, welcome aboard!” or some cheap job postings on the web?
What the FoxStreet Journal should have put in their headline is that the number of “JOB ADS” on the various web sites is rising. Their current headline is as misleading as it can be!
I have been trying for 1+ years to move out of the mid-west. 14 years in IT, last 8 and currently with a DoD contractor. i’m specifically looking at NYC area, but would like to get at least partially cost of living “adjusted” wage. My experience so far has been that that most of the jobs that are advertised on the web are either:
A) by agencies who are screening candidates but DO NOT have any immediate openings. But they certainly “hope” to have some vacancies. those ads are certainly on the rise, but they’re based on nothing but 100% pure and uncut hopium!
B) by corporations do do not have openings but wouldn’t mind “fishing out” a really talented engineer for a wage that would amount to a bit more than a monthly MetroCard (my friend’s job for the last 5 months, almost 40% less than his pre-recession wage, 20% more than his 1st post-recession wage)
C) they want skills that so few people have (ie skills you cannot attain other than actual working knowledge, such as building a nuke or designing an HFT algorithm… btw both can cause comparable amount of damage hehehehe) that such people will always be in high demand and short supply. those folks sometimes get dissatisfied by $450k salaries and resort to steal intellectual property and trying to sell it to the highest bidder…. (Aleynikov vs GS)
i know, i know, totally anecdotal… but WSJ article is waaaayy too misleading to keep silent.
December 26th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
“The key for many of the available jobs is technical expertise; they are the jobs that are the most plentiful and have the fewest number of applicants per opening.”
——
Thy forgot to add – AND be under 45 YO. Age discrimination in hiring continues to be rampant.
December 26th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
from the Comments, here http://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-opening-up-but-skill-mismatches-limit-hiring-2010-10
@bloodworm: Most of these job ads are phony.
1.) Search firms post ads for non-existent jobs to get resumes.
2.) Companies post phony ads to try to trick investors into thinking they are in growth mode.
3.) Companies post phony ads to scare current employees.
4.) Companies post lower salaries to test the water and see if people apply for a non-existent job.
That explains the entire difference.
~~
worth pondering, contains more than a ‘Grain of Truth’ ..
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/grain see def. #5
December 26th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Agree that lots of job ads do not result in jobs. Lots of fishing and posturing. The only thing that counts is hiring.
Would like to see that and hope it’s real. But remain on the cynical side. Off-shoring is not done yet.
And tech is confined for the most part to hot spots (S. F. area, Boston, NYC). The rest of the country can go suck eggs.
But at least it’s a glimmer of improvement. Let’s hope for the best.
December 26th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
I just got approval to hire 4 engineers in the US ($500 million+ global electronics biz). I’ve got 15 under me now (in the US), so 4 more is nothing to sneeze at. I added 5 in China/Taiwan in the last couple years, but this will be the first in the US in 3-4 years.
2 entry level, 1 mid level (5-10 years exp), and one guru level. Salaries will be offered at 20-30% less than we would have offered 3 years ago.
December 26th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
If some percentage of these job openings are not real, wouldn’t that have been true a year ago, two years ago, five years ago? Why are companies increasing the number of “fake” openings if they are not intending on hiring more. I think the numbers show that job openings are increasing, regardless of what percentage are real or fake.
I’m still mostly bearish overall, and I think that pockets of strong data will lead to pockets of weak data as the economy continues to grow at just above the stall rate.
December 26th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
genomik – in the industry, “cloud” has a few meanings, but generally it means consolidated computing. The focus for the consumer is to not worry about the operating system (Chromium OS is a good extreme) and focus on the centralized services. With centralization, you lack innovation. This is a cycle for the IT industry that is always going from distributed to centralized.
For business, the cloud involves virtualization, and is a really good and complex thing. It should equate to better systems that have almost no noticable downtime. There are flaws to virtualization such as sometimes not knowing what’s broken when bad things happen! I would expect this cloud concept for business to outlast the consumer version, but in all it’s heavy on marketing and it will be here in some form for a while (5-7 years or something?). After that it will probably be more distributed again, so we can get some new innovation that can’t be had with the few controlling the cloud. This tends to just happen as restrictions become a burden for a few and then it grows. The internet itself is obviously immeasurably useful and that’s not going anywhere unless governments intervene.
A quick example of the cycle:
supercomputer->mainframe ->desktop->personal computer(distributed)->laptop->netbook->webOS/cloud->
December 26th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Sorry for the bad formatting – I basically meant to say yes it’s a cycle, and we will see it again some day. Centralized->Distributed->Centralized->Distributed…
December 26th, 2010 at 11:36 pm
The job market is heating up…I received 2 offers this week, 1 from a global bank and another from a regional bank for middle market banking jobs and most in my office are getting recruited heavily with significant bumps in pay.
December 27th, 2010 at 12:56 am
As a federal employee, I’m pretty bummed the big O threw us under the bus even before negociations with the Repubs. Yes, everyone who isn’t a fed thinks we’re overpaid dogsh*t, I get that. But the timing was impeccible…just as the economy is picking up, it’s going to be pretty tough to recruit new fed employees. “Hey, welcome aboard…your pay is frozen until Jan 2013, and it’s only going to get worse next Spring when we’re facing a government shut-down.”
December 27th, 2010 at 1:19 am
Don’t worry folks. Even if jobs do take off and it results in pressures to increase wages that will be a trigger to raise interest rates. If you’ll notice carefully, during Greenspanic’s tenure, he would only raise rates when labor costs started to rise. There is no reason to believe Uncle Ben will be any different. Once the laborers get invited to the party, there goes the neighborhood and the party is over.
December 27th, 2010 at 9:51 am
I work in IT. I think this is the area where most hiring is going on ( automation, getting rid of expensive labor). We actually doing new projects, and that always involves labor savings.
We’ve had hiring freeze lifted about a year ago and not last 6 months filling the backlog of the open positions. I can tell that now we can afford to be very picky, we only hire the best at salaries of 5 years ago.
December 27th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Odd that the WSJ chart only shows job postings going back to 2008, dontchathink?
Certainly smells of spin-meistering …
And I think that a lot of the acceptances are going to be contingent on either their under-water mortgages getting bought out (fat chance!) or the hope that they will find a sucker on the other end of their relocation willing to take a haircut similar to the one they took to sell the house they are leaving …
December 27th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
[...] away at the deficit created by the Great Recession. The number of job postings at Indeed.com is almost 50 percent higher than two years [...]
December 28th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Barry, on any given day you are probably the smartest guy in the room…but somebody bamboozled you on this one:
“The key for many of the available jobs is technical expertise”
2 sec Google search confirms what most PRACTICING* engineers know:
http://www.maybenow.com/Unemployed-Engineers-q7209432
People who a have a science degree who are NOT management suck-up types are struggling. Now some of this is the engineering professions fault. I know of no other profession so loaded with sociopathic personalities who show such glee at undercutting their fellow professional…all of which, US management encourages. Often a project can be put back on the rails by transferring the back stabber management wannabee types and retaining those willing to put their shoulders to the wheel. I worked on a project where 12 men and women did what 60 men could not. Averaging 60 hour weeks for 3.5 years was hard on me, but apparently, impossible for those 15 years my junior
As a practicing engineer ages, reguardless of his contribution, his wage increases becomes much smaller in real dollars and go negative as they reach 40**. The more accolades and awards you pick-up for your work, the less likely you are to land a new job in your career field should you be laid off. Reverse incentives have made this a field for those younger than 30 and those whose real talent is bashing gifted engineers into accepting low wages.For those that don’t know, it’s done by saying 3-7 years engineering experience, meaning 23-29 years old…no older need apply. I’ve seen a lot of mediocre talent pull top dollar due to their “sweet spot” on the age curve.
*An incompetent engineer finds out early and pursues the management route.
**I’ve heard all the BS justifications for age discrimination, I have hundreds of rebuttal data points, but let start with; “Kelley” Johnson was almost 50 when he developed the SR-71, Wilbur and Orville were about forty when they developed the Flyer, which took another 10 years to turn the Flyer into a practical machine. What matters is do you still give a shit, not if you are past 35 years of age. With a policy of benching their best engineers, no wonder the USA is getting the crap beat out it in world trade to the likes of Germany with it’s higher wages.
December 29th, 2010 at 12:01 am
Testing
December 29th, 2010 at 12:02 am
Barry, on any given day you are probably the smartest guy in the room…but somebody bamboozled you on this one:
“The key for many of the available jobs is technical expertise”
2 sec Google search confirms what most PRACTICING* engineers know:
http://www.maybenow.com/Unemployed-Engineers-q7209432
People who a have a science degree who are NOT management suck-up types are struggling. Now some of this is the engineering professions fault. I know of no other profession so loaded with sociopathic personalities who show such glee at undercutting their fellow professional…all of which, US management encourages. Often a project can be put back on the rails by transferring the back stabber management wannabee types and retaining those willing to put their shoulders to the wheel. I worked on a project where 12 men and women did what 60 men could not. Averaging 60 hour weeks for 3.5 years was hard on me, but apparently, impossible for those 15 years my junior
As a practicing engineer ages, reguardless of his contribution, his wage increases becomes much smaller in real dollars and go negative as they reach 40**. The more accolades and awards you pick-up for your work, the less likely you are to land a new job in your career field should you be laid off. Reverse incentives have made this a field for those younger than 30 and those whose real talent is bashing gifted engineers into accepting low wages.For those that don’t know, it’s done by saying 3-7 years engineering experience, meaning 23-29 years old…no older need apply. I’ve seen a lot of mediocre talent pull top dollar due to their “sweet spot” on the age curve.
*An incompetent engineer finds out early and pursues the management route.
**I’ve heard all the BS justifications for age discrimination, I have hundreds of rebuttal data points, but let start with; “Kelley” Johnson was almost 50 when he developed the SR-71, Wilbur and Orville were about forty when they developed the Flyer, which took another 10 years to turn the Flyer into a practical machine. What matters is do you still give a shit, not if you are past 35 years of age. With a policy of benching their best engineers, no wonder the USA is getting the crap beat out it in world trade to the likes of Germany with it’s higher wages.