The Job Market: June 2009
I have good news and I have bad news.
The best of the good news is that we are coming off the bottom in the job market. I am hearing many stories of people receiving job offers and new positions. This is not unique to any one section of the country or any particular type of job.
People are finding work again, generally, not through fee sourced channels (non-agency).
This is progress from where we were at the beginning of the year when there was no labor market and people were not getting interviews, let alone being hired.
The bad news is that the unemployment remains incredibly high and will continue to be high for quite some time.
Let me explain the pattern for how recoveries occur.
Initially, firms start trying to hire people with obscure skills for which there is no ready pool of talent. That started at the end of the first quearter of 2009.
Next, firms realize that when they made their budget plans last year, they failed to revise any sort of project commitments based upon lower headcount and forgot to consider resignations, terminations and vacation schedules when they plotted out their plans. As a result, firms start looking for consultants or contract to hire personnel at the end of the secnd quarter and during the third quarter at relatively low rates.
That has started to occur (complete with the low rates).
So, I am ready to say that a bottom has occurred.
I am also ready to say that this is going to be a long road back, longer than the post 9/11 recession which took almost two years for normalcy in the labor markets to set in again.
We should know whether the third phase settles in during the very end of the third quarter-middle of the fourth quarter. Keep your fingers crossed!
With that knowledge, don’t give up. Fight hard to land your next job . . . NOW!
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
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