Advertiser Watch – ADC Telecommunications, Advance Auto Parts, Sears, Rite Aid, Kforce

By Charles Thibault on July 31, 2009 in Employer Watch.

Every week WANTED produces Gazelles Reports. These reports detail companies whose Hiring Demand has spiked or has shown upward trending in the past month. Gazelles can be triggered by climbing Hiring Demand across the entire United States, or can be triggered by spikes in job postings in any of the 23 major Standard Occupational Classification Codes. Media clients can also receive Gazelles centered around a geographic market area. Every week, we review 5 companies who have appeared in the Gazelles report, with a bias towards those that are publicly traded.

Rite Aid (NYSE:RAD), the drug store, has created a Gazelles alert by posting for "First-Line Supervisors/Managers of Retail Sales Workers". It has posted an average of 50 such job per week for the last year. Just in the first three weeks of July it posted 592 of these jobs, or almost 150 per week. The historical point correlation between the 4-week moving summation of new job ads and stock price is 0.65.

Source: WANTED Analytics

ADC Telecommunications (NASDAQ:ADCT) has triggered a Gazelles alert by posting 21 "Telecommunications Equipment Installers and Repairers" jobs so far in July. In the past 9 weeks, they have posted 42 such jobs. Up until that point, they had only posted 50 such jobs in 2009. It also posted 18 jobs in the Minneapolis metro area in June, the location of its corporate headquarters, the most since August of last year. Over the past three years, ADC stock price has been closely correlated with their number of job ads – the point correlation of the 4-week moving summation of new jobs and stock price is 0.55.

Source: WANTED Analytics

Advance Auto Parts (NYSE:AAP) has triggered a Gazelles alert by posting 75 job ads on a board it had never used before (Job Circle). Job ads and stock price have a historical correlation of 0.38 for Advance Auto Parts.

Source: WANTED Analytics

Sears, Roebuck & Company (NASDAQ:SHLD) has triggered a Gazelles alert by doubling its job ad count in the last month compared to its 12-month average. Since hitting a low in Hiring Demand with only 499 ads the week of March 8th, new job ads postings have increased steadily, to 1,994 last week. Sears stock is up 88% since that date. The historical correlation between Sears job ads and its stock price is very strong at 0.63.

Source: WANTED Analytics

Finally, Kforce (NASDAQ:KFRC), the staffing company, has triggered a Gazelles alert by flooding Monster.com with 851 job ads last week, and 613 job ads the week before that. Its historical average is only 12 job ads per week on that site. Tracking a staffing firm's performance by counting the number of its online job ads is particularly relevant – the number of ads it's advertising for, i.e. the number of positions it has been contracted to recruit for, is directly tied into revenues. The correlation between the number of job ads and Kforce stock price is a stunning 0.78.