At least not in the southeast. Our good friend Steve Slifer, a well-known economist who gets it right, sends out a weekly newsletter that recaps the weeks’ economic news. His lead article this week provides great insight into the state of the job market. I share this because if you believe the mainstream media, you’d think all you have to do is run a help wanted ad on one of the popular websites and candidates will beat a path to your door. Those of us work in employment / recruiting every day exist in a different reality. Great talent is and will continue to be in short supply, so if your company is seeking employees, go ahead and run an ad. If you get the results you want kudos. If not, then let the trained recruiters at Dunhill Staffing Systems help you find the skilled new employees you need.
From Steve’s newsletter – The employment report for January was generally interpreted as a disappointment because payroll jobs rose by 49 thousand and the December decline, which was originally published as a drop of 140 thousand, was revised to a larger decline of 227 thousand. While factually correct, that interpretation is grossly misleading. Never mentioned in the press is that the workweek jumped 0.3 hour to a record length of 35.0 hours in January. At the same time the unemployment rate fell 0.4% in January to 6.3% and now appears likely to fall to 4.0% (the full employment threshold) by the end of this year – two years sooner than the Fed and most market economists expect. The January employment report was sufficiently strong to cause us to revise our first quarter GDP forecast upwards from 2.6% to 3.5% and even that may be too low. The rest of the story – click here
