Hiring Demand Indicators – Jobs. Trends. Insight.

IT Occupations Slip 5.7% in July

By Charles Thibault on July 27, 2009 in Computer/Math/IT, Hiring Demand Indicators.

Hiring Demand for IT Occupations slipped 5.7% on a year-over-year basis compared to last month. Nine of the ten IT occupations classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed decline.

Compared to last year, Hiring Demand for IT occupations is down 35.7%. It was down only 30% last month. "Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts", which had been relatively spared so far, saw the largest relative drop in Hiring Demand, falling 9% to -18.2% compared to a year ago.

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June '09 Hiring Demand Outlook: Slippage, but Poised for Upward Trending

By Charles Thibault on July 8, 2009 in Hiring Demand Indicators.

Last month we reported that National Hiring Demand was improving in relative terms – year-over-year percent changes improved from -32.6% in April 2009 to -28.4% in May of 2009. Hiring Demand has slipped slightly since last month, with year-over-year percentage changes moving from -27.2% in May to -30.1% in June. (Slight revisions to data cause minor variations in Hiring Demand percent changes when compared to previously published results).

This month's slippage is particularly due to a robust month of May – on a seasonally adjusted basis May's Hiring Demand was up 10% compared to April. Because of May's increase in Hiring Demand, in combination with improving month-over-month declines in Nonfarm Payroll Employment (the revised drop for May was -322,000, whereas April's final number was -519,000), WANTED had forecast an optimistic drop of 260,000 in Nonfarm Payroll Employment. Despite the slight slippage this month, Hiring Demand has moved from "being flat" to starting to show signs of a possible uptrend.

The two time-series charts of new online job ads, one weekly series and one monthly series, show that since the drop off in December, Hiring Demand has been slowly inching up. (Usually the series "bounces back" in January, but, given the recession, new job ads did not come back to the previous calendar year's level.) This corresponds to slightly improving UI claims data and slowing in the month-over-month drops in US Employment.

Source: WANTED Analytics 2.0

WANTED Hiring Demand Indicators – IT Occupations, May '09

By Charles Thibault on June 29, 2009 in Computer/Math/IT, Hiring Demand Indicators.

Year-over-year drops in Hiring Demand for IT workers have improved in relative terms, in parallel with US Hiring Demand. Compared to last May, IT Hiring Demand is down 32.8% – in April, Hiring Demand was down 38.5%.

Source: WANTED Analytics 2.0

8 of the 10 IT Occupations have shown relative improvement in Hiring Demand. Only 'Network and Computer Systems Administrators' and 'Computer Programmers' have shown slight decreases in the level of Hiring Demand.

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May '09 Hiring Demand Trend: Flat and Still Well Below Prior Year

By Charles Thibault on June 9, 2009 in Hiring Demand Indicators.

Hiring Demand has stabilized in the United States, and year-over-year drops in Hiring Demand are shrinking, based on data reported by WANTED Analytics.

In April, US Hiring Demand was down 32.6% compared to the same period a year ago. As of May, Hiring Demand was down only 28.4% , an improvement of 4.2%.

Overall, the trend in Hiring Demand is flat, after a significant downward trend in the second half of 2008. The following time-series graph, showing the number of weekly new ads is fitted with log-linear time trends. The pattern of job ad volume since January has been essentially flat.

Source: WANTED Analytics 2.0

In May, 19 of the 22 major occupational groups have shown relative improvements in hiring demand compared to April.

Computer and Mathematical Occupations, down 40% last month compared to a year ago, are down only 30% this month, an improvement of 10%.
Management Occupations, down 37.4% last month, are down 27.5% this month, an improvement of 9.9%.
Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, down 27.6% last month, are down 19.2% this month, an improvement of 8.4%.
The only occupations to show growth on a year-over-year basis are Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations.

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WANTED Hiring Demand Indicators – IT Occupations, April '09

By Charles Thibault on May 22, 2009 in Computer/Math/IT, Hiring Demand Indicators.

Information Technology hiring demand is still declining, according to data gathered from WANTED Analytics 2.0. Overall hiring demand is down 38% compared to the same period last year. Last month, hiring demand was down only 30% on year-over-year basis.

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What's more, IT workers have been hit harder than the national average this month. Last month, both IT and National hiring demand was down 30%, year-over-year. This month, National hiring demand is down 32%, whereas IT is down 38%.

The number of new job ads is expected to continue to decline through the end of May, not only because of the downward trend for IT workers, but also because May has typically displayed a downward seasonal effect. The past three years, there has been an average drop of 18,000 new job ads during the last week of May.

We expect that June will show month-over-month increases in hiring demand, mostly again because of seasonal effects. However, we expect the overall downward trend to continue through at least June. Read more »

WANTED Hiring Demand Indicators – IT Occupations, March '09

By Juli Morris and Charles Thibault on April 23, 2009 in Computer/Math/IT, Hiring Demand Indicators.

Year-over-year hiring demand growth for all Computer and Mathematical Occupations (SOC 150000) has kept pace with the national average for all occupations, at -30%. The various occupations within the IT sector, however, have been hit differently by the recession.

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WANTED's Hiring Demand Indicators show that the IT occupations losing the least ground from March 2008 to March 2009 are high-value IT workers and those responsible for maintaining corporate IT infrastructure: Network and Computer Systems Administrators; Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts; and Computer Software Engineers – System Software. Hiring demand is down only 11% or 12% for these occupations. Database Administrators are the exception, losing 33%.
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WANTED Hiring Demand Indicators – All Occupations, March '09

By Juli Morris and Charles Thibault on April 22, 2009 in Hiring Demand Indicators.

WANTED's Hiring Demand Indicators confirms what most people already feel about the US economy–no one has been spared. According to our data, all occupations lost ground between March 2008 and March 2009, measured year-over-year.

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Hiring demand in health care, which is generally thought to be an acyclical industry, has shown contraction. However, the two broad health care occupational categories hold two of the top three "least worst" year-over-year performances, supporting the hypothesis that health care, if not completely acyclical, is at least one of the industries most resistent to recessions. Indeed, whereas total US non-farm employment has shrunk by 4.8 million workers in the past year, the health care industry has added 325,000 workers in the past year. Since hiring demand has been negative since October 2008, it may only be a matter of time before the health care industry also experiences a contraction in overall employment.
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A Three-Month Leading Indicator: White Paper from WANTED Technologies

By Juli Morris on April 21, 2009 in Hiring Demand Indicators.

WANTED Technologies' predictions of monthly Nonfarm Employment changes are twice as accurate as those of finance professionals surveyed as sources for "Consensus Estimates." Now, a white paper providing researchers with information about the data and statistical modeling behind WANTED's HDI is available upon request.

WANTED Hiring Demand Indicators™ — A Three-Month Leading Indicator of Changes to U.S. Nonfarm Employment explains basic methods for forecasting changes in the level of U.S. employment, as well as improvements in accuracy gained by incorporating WANTED Hiring Demand Indicators data into the forecast model.

Contact WANTED to request a copy.

Hiring as a recession indicator

By Juli Morris on March 24, 2009 in Hiring Demand Indicators.

In early March, Calculated Risk cited a paper by Professor Leamer of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, Housing and the Business Cycle, which focuses on the variations in key economic measures relative to the beginning and end of recessions.

The paper and the discussion describe the degree to which different economic indicators – such as residential housing investment – may move up or down at the onset of a recession or at the beginning of a recovery.

Typically, Non-Farm Employment and the Unemployment Rate are both included in the economic indicators tracked during the business cycle.

However, until recently there has not been a comprehensive way to measure hiring demand – or, in other words, there's been no way to measure employers' intention to hire workers. Only since the advent of the Internet, when employers began advertising open positions online have we been able to to measure "hiring demand" in a comprehensive and rigorous fashion.

WANTED has been making these measurements since May 2005 and now has been able to track the contraction in hiring demand – based on online job ads – which began in early 2008 and rapidly accelerated in the fourth quarter.

We can't say for sure yet – because it has not been tested through multiple recessions – but we believe it may be possible to forecast business cycles more accurately using hiring demand, in combination with other economic indicators.

So far, we have shown that adding the level of hiring demand to an ARIMA model significantly improves the ability to forecast upcoming monthly changes in the BLS's release of total non-farm employment.

We hope that same data can help identify turning points in the current economic cycle.

What hiring demand can tell you about the economic recovery

By Juli Morris on March 2, 2009 in Hiring Demand Indicators.

The ability to predict the start of a recession (or the end of a recession and the beginning of a growth period) is the goal of numerous economists. The value to investors of a predictive tool that serves as a real-time recession indicator is inarguable. Yet the creation of such a tool has remained elusive.

For Wall Street and private-sector economists, the analysis of employment data is key to understanding business cycles and making such predictions. There are numerous reports available on employment. And every such report has a following among academics and private-sector researchers.

In simple terms, these reports can be broken into two areas: government research and private-sector analysis. The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the most relevant findings each month in its "Employment Situation" report. In the report, BLS, a division of the U.S. Department of Labor, reports on employment levels as of the prior month.
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