Occupations – Jobs. Trends. Insight.

IT Hiring Staggers in Q2 – Tech Stocks drop 8%

By Charles Thibault on July 30, 2010 in Computer/Math/IT, Information Technology - XLK.

After 12 months of steady growth, hiring in the Information Technology sector went flat in Q2. The S&P Technology index fell by 8% during the second quarter of 2010 as a result (NYSE:XLK).

The following graphs the number of new online job postings for IT workers in the United States, monthly:

Source: WANTED Analytics - Hiring Demand Dashboard

15 months ago, there were 72,000 paid-for online job postings for IT workers in the United States (we exclude free sites like Craig's List). Online job postings for IT workers grew by about 2.4% a month on average for a full year – the equivalent of an additional 2,350 new job postings a month – before settling at the 102,000 mark in March. Since then, however, hiring for new IT workers has gone flat, and even fell by 1.7% in April.

Overall hiring is still half its pre-recession levels.

Stock markets have taken notice: since hitting a 52-week high of 24.08 in April, the S&P 500 Technology sector SPDR ETF sits at 22.19 today, a 7.8% drop (NYSE:XLK). This is a better result than a month ago (July 2), when the sector index stood at 20.29, a 15.7% drop relative to the April high. The pick-up in the sector index over the past month has been matched by a slight increase in June IT Hiring.

The following graph shows the number of online job postings for IT workers in the United States (using the Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational Classification system for "Computer Specialists") and the evolution of the S&P Technology index (NYSE:XLK).

Source: WANTED Analytics, Google Finance

More important, however, is the analysis of the yearly returns of the S&P Technology index and the yearly growth in Hiring Demand: equity analysts care about the future returns of an index, and yearly growth rate in Hiring Demand appropriately captures evolving temporal dynamics as well as having the advantage of being free of seasonal variation. Notice how the stock market index picked up about 6 months before hiring did – stock markets are usually forward-looking by about six months. Notice too how the slow-down in the Hiring Demand growth rate in February has caused returns of the S&P Technology sector index to lose steam. In other words, the stock markets may have gotten a little ahead of themselves, and the slow-down in hiring meant that aggressive forward-looking expectations were no longer sustainable.

Source: WANTED Analytics, Google Finance

The following table lists the Top 25 companies in terms of IT job postings over the past three months:

Advertiser	Job Postings – May, June, July 2010
Deloitte	4,098
General Dynamics Information Technology	3,992
Microsoft Corporation	2,680
Northrop Grumman	2,238
SPARTA Inc	1,818
Unitedhealth Group	1,579
IBM	1,523
SAIC	1,501
AT&T	1,404
HP	1,313
Amazon.com	1,290
Raytheon	1,274
ManTech International	1,178
Lockheed Martin	1,038
Booz Allen Hamilton	876
Emc Corporation	860
SRA International	836
GE Energy	814
BAE Systems	753
Kaiser Permanente	667
Dell	653
Google	602
Harris Corporation	601
Yahoo!	592
Agile Enterprise Solutions	578

Business & Finance Job Postings up 22% from Last Year, Continued Growth in Corporate Hiring

By Charles Thibault and Harold Biswas on June 24, 2010 in BLS Nonfarm Employment, Business/Finance.

190,000 Business Operations & Financial Specialist job ads have been posted online over the past three months. This is an extra 35,000 job postings compared to the the same time last year, a 22% growth according to data from WANTED Analytics™, which tracks online job postings on over a thousand job boards. Job ads are unduplicated across sites, and only paid-for job postings are included in this analysis.

Hiring Demand growth in Business & Finance occurred in all major metro areas and job types. The largest growth occurred in the New York City and Stamford, Connecticut areas.

A particularly relevant and important result is that hiring for Personnel Recruiters has more than doubled compared to last year. There were over 10,000 new job ads posted for recruiters in March, April, and May 2010, compared to only 4,600 for the same period last year. This is a very positive sign: corporations are hiring the workers responsible for future hiring.

IT Hiring is Growing: 185,000 New Online Job Ads in April

By Charles Thibault on May 7, 2010 in Computer/Math/IT.

The number of online job ads for Information Technology professionals is up 34% compared to last year according to data from WANTED Analytics, which tracks job postings on over a thousand job boards.

There were 185,000 online job ads for IT workers in April, compared to only 138,000 last year.

Total Hiring Demand for IT workers is still well below the 2008 pre-recession peak of 240,000 job ads, however.

There are approximately 3 million IT workers in the United States, creating a ratio of one job ad for every 16 IT workers. A year ago, 23 IT workers had to compete for the same job.

IT hiring is on a year-long upward trend affecting most types of IT jobs. Web developers have particularly come on strong, with the number of online job postings approaching 2007 (but not 2008) levels :

Information Technology - 4-year hiring trend

Source: WANTED Analytics

Hiring Demand has bounced back up nicely in California, the largest employer of IT workers in the US – Hiring Demand for IT professionals is up 36% in California compared to last year.

New York City, however, is the metro area with the most IT jobs, and Hiring Demand in the Big Apple now exceeds 2008 levels. Online job ads are up 74% in the state of New York, twice California's growth rate.

Seen on the job boards – BP is hiring Subsea & Marine Engineers

By Juli Morris on May 5, 2010 in Employer Watch, Occupations.

Part of a (very) timely job posting, first seen in our data on May 1, 2010, from Net-Temps:

Riser & Flowline Systems Engineer (BP America Inc.)

Sub-category: Subsea & Marine Engineering

Location: Houston

Role Synopsis: The Riser and Flowline Systems Engineer will be responsible to provide engineering support for the long-term integrity management of risers and flowlines for deepwater floating production systems in the Gulf of Mexico. Primary focus areas are mechanical and structural integrity, corrosion and erosion, hazard evaluation, management of change, emergency response, system performance monitoring, maintaining regulatory compliance, and minimizing potential operating downtime…

And not a moment too soon.

Finance, Health Care, IT Stocks Lose Momentum as Hiring Slows

By Charles Thibault on February 2, 2010 in Business/Finance, Computer/Math/IT, Finance - XLF, Health Care, Health Care - XLV, Information Technology - XLK, S&P 500 - SPY.

Several stock market industry segments have taken hits over the past two or three weeks as the labor market situation deteriorated slightly during the second half of January.

Health Care stocks are down 2.9% over the last two weeks (XLV); Information Technologies stocks are down 9.5% over the last three weeks (XLK); and Finance stocks are down 7% over the last three weeks (XLF). The 4-week moving average of new unemployment insurance claims has gone up two weeks in a row.

Hiring in these three sectors – Finance, Health Care, and Information Technologies – has slowed in the past two weeks too, falling off the positive trend they started in September. What's worse, year-over-year hiring improvements have swung from positive to negative in these sectors.

The following analysis confirms a great Q4 in terms of GDP growth (+5.7% annualized), but also suggests that growth rates are slowing.

Let's first take a second to make sure we're not presenting conflicting information about the labor market situation, particularly compared to the Conference Board's Help Wanted Online series which uses the "same" data as we present here (HWOL). That series uses a "mid-month to mid-month" time-frame in order to match the BLS's sampling framework which measures national employment on the 14th day of each month. In early January, we did see some positive labor market signals. However, national Hiring Demand fell by 3.7% two weeks ago (after the HWOL sampling period closed). Since January 19th, the S&P 500 index has lost 4.3% too. This is after the S&P 500 gained 3.6% during the first couple of weeks of January on positive December UI claims data.

The following table compares year-over-year changes in sector Hiring Demand (the number of new online job ads) and weekly returns of sector Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). Sector ETFs are tradable securities which mimic the composition and returns of the different sector indices developed by Standard & Poor's. Sector indices are sub-components of the S&P 500.

Source: WANTED Analytics, Google Finance

IT Hiring Demand Maintains Growth Trend; Washington, DC Surpasses New York

By Charles Thibault on December 10, 2009 in Computer/Math/IT, Hiring Demand Indicators.

Hiring Demand for IT workers remained on trend in November, according to data from WANTED Analytics which tracks the number of online job ads on over 1,500 employment websites. On a seasonally adjusted basis, IT Hiring Demand is up 0.5%.

The end of November usually marks the start of a two month seasonal hiring slowdown. We were in fact expecting the number of job ads to fall slightly on a seasonally unadjusted basis, as shown in the graph below.

Source: WANTED Analytics

Sales Jobs Growing 4.3% a Month – 15 Times Faster than before Recession

By Charles Thibault on November 11, 2009 in Sales.

Hiring Demand for Sales & Related Occupations has been growing 4.3% a month since February, according to data from WANTED Analytics. WANTED Analytics tracks the number of online job ads on over 1,000 employment websites.

This positive trend has affected most metropolitan areas and detailed occupations in the Sales category (BLS Standard Occupation Major Group 410000).

The "normal" monthly growth rate experienced during the 2006/2007/2008 pre-recession period was only 0.3%. In other words, Hiring Demand is growing at almost 15 times the rate it did during normal economic times. Most of this can be attributed to "catching up", however – about 950,000 people lost their jobs in the Retail Industry for example, a 6% drop in employment. There are still 30,000 fewer Sales job ads now than there were 2 years ago (136,000 in October compared to 169,000 in November 2007).

The following table and graph detail Hiring Demand trends over the past four years. The natural log of the number of online job ads is used to facilitate trending analysis

Period	"Sales Jobs, Monthly Growth Rate"
OCT 2006 – MAY 2008	+0.3%
JUNE 2008 – JAN 2009	-5.2%
FEB 2009 – Current	+4.3%

Source: WANTED Analytics

IT Hiring Demand Robust in October – Trending up 4.9% per Month (update)

By Charles Thibault on November 9, 2009 in Computer/Math/IT, Hiring Demand Indicators.

Hiring Demand for "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" grew by 6.5% in October on a seasonally unadjusted basis according to data from WANTED Analytics 2.0. This confirms the positive trend we saw begin in June, when Hiring Demand starting growing at an average monthly rate of 4.9%. This positive trend has affected most US metro areas.

WANTED Analytics tracks the number of online job ads on over 1,000 employment websites:

Source: WANTED Analytics

IT Hiring Demand grew faster than the rest of the economy – national Hiring Demand, all Occupations considered, grew by 4.0% over the same period. Removing the positive effect that IT workers had on the national average, national Hiring Demand grew by only 3.3%. (In other words, IT occupations contributed 0.7% to the overall growth in national Hiring Demand).

The table below details changes in Hiring Demand by occupation. Occupations are defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and their Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System. Five occupations saw increases in Hiring Demand, while three saw drops. Drops were concentrated in "Computer Software Engineers", both "Applications" and "Systems Software".

SOC	SOC Description	Percent Change, OCT (NSA)
000000	All Occupations	4.0%
150000	Computer and Mathematical Occupations	6.5%
151071	Network and Computer Systems Administrators	9.5%
151021	Computer Programmers	9.1%
151061	Database Administrators	7.9%
151081	Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts	7.7%
151041	Computer Support Specialists	5.7%
151051	Computer Systems Analysts	-1.2%
151031	Computer Software Engineers, Applications	-5.9%
151032	Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software	-27.0%

What's more, IT Hiring Demand is growing faster now than it did during the "boom times" of 2006/2007. The following table and weekly time series chart, where the count of online job ads is taken as a natural log to facilitate trending analysis, clearly shows this:

Period	Monthly Growth Rate
Oct.2006 – June 2008	+1.2%
July 2008 – May 2009	-6.5%
June 2009 – Current	+4.9%

Phoenix Great for Health Care Jobs, #1 in US for RN's

By Charles Thibault on November 3, 2009 in Health Care.

Phoenix, AZ is one of the best US markets for Health Care Practitioners, according to our Supply/Demand Ratios. What's more, Health Care workers are also "in-demand" in the Phoenix market. In other words, not only is Phoenix a great place for Health Care workers compared to other cities, but Health Care occupations also outrank other occupations within the Phoenix market.

Phoenix is ranked first in the US for Registered Nurses Hiring Demand (view our heat map and ranked market list for RN's). Registered Nurses are the second most important occupation in the United States (they carry an economic weight of $165 billion, second only to 'General and Operations Managers' who have an economic weight of $185 billion. 'Retail Salespersons' come in third at $110 billion). In August, Phoenix was ranked second after Las Vegas for RN Hiring Demand.

Remember that our Supply/Demand Ratios are constructed such that the number of online job ads is standardized against local occupational employment counts. (We'd expect larger markets to have more online job ads, so our S/D Ratios 'control' for market size).

Office and Administrative Support – Job Search Strategies

By Charles Thibault on October 26, 2009 in Office/Admin Support.

In a difficult labor market workers may have to "start at the bottom of the corporate ladder". Recent college grads that have yet to find work, for example, may have to lower their salary expectations and simply get their foot in the door, waiting for a better position to open up around them.

In this week's discussion of WANTED's Supply/Demand Ratios, we examine the best markets for Office and Administrative Support Workers to search for employment. Office/Admin Support jobs can represent good entry-level opportunities.

Remember that our S/D Ratios homepage also ranks occupations within a market, so that those not willing to move can see which occupations are in highest demand in their market (ex.Chicago, IL).

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