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.

Over the past few months the BLS has reported Nonfarm Employment gains, mostly bolstered by temporary Decennial Census workers. The net gain in private sector employment was 41,000 workers for the month of May, even as the Census hired 411,000 temporary workers. Current growth trends in Business and Financial Operations Occupations shows that businesses across the country have started to hire again. Combined with the Personnel Recruiter result above, WANTED expects continued steady improvements in Nonfarm Employment payrolls, although monthly gains are likely to be modest:

Source: WANTED Analytics

The largest market for Business Operations & Financial Specialists is New York, followed by the typical list of large US metros including Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Source: WANTED Analytics

The New York and Connecticut areas have shown the largest growth. The Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk area grew 63% compared to last year, and New York grew 58%. Other cities come in strong, including the Northwest cities of Portland and Seattle.

Almost all occupations saw increases in Hiring Demand, with the notable exceptions of Loan Officers and Personal Financial Advisors. Management Analysts had an impressive year-over-year growth of 60%. This group was outdone only by hiring growth for Personnel Recruiters – growth for these workers stands at 130%.

Source: WANTED Analytics

© Copyright 2010 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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 :

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.

Source: WANTED Analytics

The following table shows the number of online job postings for IT professionals in the 50 States, as well as year-over-year percent changes :

© Copyright 2010 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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.

© Copyright 2010 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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

First, let's look at the Financial sector (XLF). Notice how Hiring – measured in YoY % changes – and yearly returns on the index move in tandem. (Year-over-year analysis removes any seasonality in the data and corresponds to a reasonable investment holding period). In the past three weeks, we've seen a deterioration in hiring in the financial sector of about 8% which has been matched by a 7% fall in the sector index. Notice how the data from the past few weeks has fallen below the trend line started in September.

The IT sector has not quite yet fully recovered from the recession, probably because investments in information infrastructure is a forward looking activity – Hiring Demand is still down compared to last year on an absolute basis. That situation has worsened recently too, with year-over-year declines going from -15% on January 9th to -18% and then to -17.5% in the two following weeks. That stock market sector index has taken a hit of 9.5% over the past three weeks.

Notice how in the IT industry hiring continued to fall even though stock prices stabilized (the blue line is moving back up as the red line continues downwards). In the Financial industry (above), hiring and stock market prices recovered at the same time.

What's interesting about the Health Care sector is that this was one of the few sectors where hiring continued to be robust despite the financial crisis. In other words, that sector was fundamentally sound and hiring did not slow down even though stocks in that sector took a huge hit. It took about 4 months for the economic crisis to hit hiring in the Health Care sector (the hiring drop-off is "to the right" of the stock price drop off). Notice how, in this instance as well, the last couple of weeks of hiring are below what we would have expected had the trend continued.

All of these graphs show the same story: (1) Moderate stabilization during the summer of 2009; (2) accelerated improvements starting in September 2009, explaining great Q4 GDP growth; (3) Three weeks of Hiring Demand data that has fallen short of what we would have expected had that great trend continued, driving sector indices downward.

© Copyright 2010 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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

One of the interesting consequences of the recession is that Washington, DC now posts more IT jobs than New York City. The financial crisis hit New York City the hardest, and the "more buffered nature" of Washington's economy (think federal government) means that it's Hiring Demand didn't fall quite as much. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York City had 252,000 "Computer and Mathematical" workers in May 2008, (Standard Occupation Code 150000), while Washington had 203,000. We can expect, when the BLS releases its 2009 data, that the Washington, DC metro now employs more of these workers that New York.

Hiring Demand in Boston fell sharply after a stronger than expected October:

Source: WANTED Analytics

The only occupation to be have seen some difficulties in the 3rd quarter of 2009 are "Applications Engineers".

Source: WANTED Analytics

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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

Source: WANTED Analytics

The 'Top 4' Sales occupations in terms of job ad volume have all seen improvements since February. Hiring Demand for 'Retail Sales Workers' is almost back to pre-recession levels, and Hiring Demand for their Supervisors is also showing a very good trend. The only occupation to have seen a little bit of slippage in the past couple months are 'Wholesale Sales Representatives'.

Source: WANTED Analytics

The 'Top 5' US metro areas have also all seen improvements in Hiring Demand for Sales workers:

Source: WANTED Analytics

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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".

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:

Source: WANTED Analytics

The upward trend has affected most US metro areas, although not uniformly. Looking at the 'Top 5' US Metro Areas in terms of job ad volume, IT Hiring Demand over the past 5 months has grown the most in Boston (+8.5%), followed by New York (+7.0%), Washington (+4.9%), Los Angeles (+3.6%) and Chicago (+1.7%).

Source: WANTED Analytics

The graph below, taken from WANTED Analytics, details the number of new online job listings for 4 of the 5 occupations showing growth in October:

Source: WANTED Analytics

Both types of "Computer Software Engineers" saw declines in October. These were the only two IT occupations to experience a significant drop in October.

Source: WANTED Analytics

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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).

Of the 48 detailed "Healthcare Practitioner and Technical Occupations" covered by our S/D Ratios, Phoenix ranks in the 'US Top 10 Cities' for 18 of them (SOC major group 290000). Of the 13 "Healthcare Support Occupations", Phoenix ranks in the 'US Top 10 Cities' for 5 of them. (SOC major group 310000).

The following table highlights health care occupations for which Phoenix figures in the US Top 10.

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

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).

We focus on the top 8 detailed occupations within the broad "Office and Admin Support" occupational category (standard occupation group 43-0000). Only those occupations national employment greater than 1,000,000 are considered. Each occupation in the table below has a hyperlink which brings the user to our occupational "heat map" and S/D Ratios tables:

Combined, these 8 occupations employ around 15 million workers, or fully 10% of the US workforce. $470 billion dollars are paid out in wages every year to these 8 types of workers.

The table below presents the number of online job ads for these 8 occupations in the top 6 US markets in September 2009:

Source: WANTED Supply/Demand Ratios

Finally, what's the outlook for this occupation? Are these types of jobs in demand, or are companies hiring fewer and fewer of them? The time-series below shows the number of new online job ads for Office/Admin Support Occupations in the US, on a monthly basis:

Source: WANTED Analytics

Like most occupations, hiring trended downwards with the recession starting in Jan 2008, and took a hit in October 2008 when the financial crisis struck. Since then, even though the number of jobs ads is half its pre-recession level, Hiring Demand has been steadily trending back upwards.

Particularly of note is the seasonal movement in October. Office/Admin workers see spikes in demand in March and October (after the Labor Day slowdown). This month is a great time for these types of workers to seek employment opportunities.

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

Supply/Demand Ratios data are used to determine which markets have the most recruitment activity, relative to the quantity of qualified candidates already employed there. Each of the following IT workers can follow the hyperlink to produce a ranked list of cities with the most online job postings:

- Computer Programmers
- Computer Applications Engineers
- Systems Software Engineers
- Computer Systems Analysts
- Database Administrators
- Network Administrators
- Network Analysts

Combining the data from the occupations listed above, we can generate a composite list of the "Top 20" markets for IT workers. Metropolitan areas in the table below are ranked based on this composite index. All values in the table below are the city's national ranking – a value of 1 means that city displayed the most recruitment advertising nationally for that occupation:

Source: WANTED Supply/Demand Ratios

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

The Financial Services Hiring Demand Indicator–a measure of year-over-year change in online job advertising– rose for the fifth consecutive month, from -27 percent in August to -25 percent in September.

Within the NAICS code subcategories in the Financial sector, Hiring Demand data for NAICS 522, Credit Intermediation and Related Services—the banking industry—showed a 9 percent rise in online job ads, regaining the upward trending we've seen since April. BLS reported a loss of 7,400 jobs in September, and revised its August loss downward from 4,900 to 9,700. July's gain of 400 jobs was also revised into negative territory, with a loss of 1,900 jobs.

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

In NAICS 523, Securities, Commodity Contracts and Other Financial investments — the brokerage community–September employment registered no change, while the August loss of 2,300 jobs was revised upward to a loss of 1,800. While Hiring Demand data showed a 24 percent year-over-year decline in the number of online jobs in September, this drop was generated by a spike in job ads in September 2008.

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

Today's news was a great improvement for the Insurance sector. In NAICS 524, Insurance Carriers and Related, September employment fell just 1,000 jobs, and August's loss was revised significantly upwards, from 12,800 to 6,900. July's loss also saw a significant positive revision, from 9,400 to 5,400. Hiring Demand data showed a solid uptick in September, from -21 percent to -16 percent.

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

For more charts, graphs and forecasts, visit our BLS Forecast page.

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

The Health Care Hiring Demand Indicator–a measure of year-over-year change in online job advertising–showed a slight decrease this month, but remains flat since the strong uptick  last quarter from -27 percent in April to -17 percent in May.  The trend in Hiring Demand in Health Care had been moving steadily downward from a peak it reached in June 2007 prior to the onset of the recession in December 2007, reaching a bottom which appeared to occur in the first quarter of 2009.

For more charts, graphs and forecasts, visit our BLS Forecast page.

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

There are still 117,000 fewer online job ads for Computer and Mathematical workers compared to a year ago – a drop of 38.7%. However, a month ago, the year-over-year decline stood at 39.8%. This relative improvement of 1.1% is a simple way of controlling for seasonal fluctuations. Over the same period, National Hiring Demand for all occupations improved by 2.9%.

Source: WANTED Analytics

The following double-bar chart compares September's year-over-year drop (burgundy) to August's (gray). Burgundy bars that are shorter than gray ones indicate relative improvement since last month. The chart can be enlarged by clicking on it.

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

Several occupations are worth noting.

Network and Computer Systems Administrators saw a significant jump in postings in September. Postings improved 10%.

Source: WANTED Analytics

Conversely, both types of Computer Software Engineers – Systems Software and Applications – saw a precipitous drop over the past couple of weeks. Applications Software Engineers dropped 5.8%, and Systems Software Engineers dropped 7.4%.

Source: WANTED Analytics

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

The number of online job ads for Financial Specialists grew by 7.0% on a seasonally adjusted basis from last month, after declining 2% in August. This improvement in Hiring Demand dampens job losses but is not strong enough to produce gains in employment.

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its Preliminary August Estimate for the Finance and Insurance sector as part of its Employment Situation report on Friday, October 2, at 8:30 AM.

WANTED Technologies also forecasts employment counts within selected industry sub-groups. We forecast losses of 1,600 workers in the Credit Intermediation sector (NAICS 522), a loss of only 300 workers in the Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments sector (NAICS 523), and a loss of 6,600 workers in Insurance Carriers (NAICS 524).

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

We forecast a relative improvement in the Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments sector despite worsening year-over-yer declines in Hiring Demand. This month's 24% year-over-year decline in the number of online jobs was generated by a spike in job ads in September 2008.

In fact, the brightest spot in the financial sector is the turnaround in investment activities. The stock market has rallied 56% since March 9th. The number of online job ads for "Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents" totaled 4,800 last week, whereas there were only 1,400 when the market rally started in early March 2009.

Securities, Commodity Contracts… (523):

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

Source: WANTED Analytics

Just as last month, job losses in the "Finance and Insurance" industry are concentrated in Insurance Carriers (524):

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation

Full-size chart available on Jobs. Trends. Insight.

The Health Care Hiring Demand Indicator–a measure of year-over-year change in online job advertising–dropped slightly this month from -15 percent to -16 percent. Hiring Demand for Health Care reached its three-year peak in June 2007, prior to the onset of the recession in December 2007, and moved steadily downward until reaching a bottom in the first quarter of 2009. Following a gain of 10 percent in June, Hiring Demand in this sector has remained flat.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its Preliminary September Estimate for the Health Care sector as part of its Employment Situation report on Friday, October 2, at 8:30 AM.

For more charts, graphs and forecasts, visit our BLS Forecast page.

© Copyright 2009 WANTED Technologies Corporation