The Conference Board

 


Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series

The Latest Press Release

THESE DATA ARE FOR ANALYSIS PURPOSES ONLY. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION, PUBLISHING, DATABASING, OR PUBLIC POSTING WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION.

Online Advertised Vacancies Were Essentially Unchanged in October

November 3, 2008

Download a PDF of the press release (which includes a breakdown of the number of new online help wanted ads)and the technical notes .

Download the National Historical Table.

Online advertised vacancies were essentially unchanged at 4,439,000 in October, following a large loss in September, according to The Conference Board's Help-Wanted Online Data Series (HWOL)™ released today. Large losses continued in major financial sector States (New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois) while other States were little changed. New ads in October (those listed for the first time) dropped by 34,000, continuing their downward trend.

"The October labor demand data show losses in the financial sector but the greater impact will likely be in the November numbers," said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. "Demand was also down for workers in other areas of the economy, like sales, maintenance and repair, and construction. Based on the all-time low reading in The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index, we are likely to see more widespread deterioration in labor demand over the coming months."

The release schedule, national historic table and technical notes to this series are available at The Conference Board website, www.conference-board.org/economics/helpwantedOnline.cfm. The underlying data for The Conference Board HWOL are The effect of lower employer demand, combined with increasing unemployment (Chart 1), makes it more difficult for the unemployed to find jobs. The gap between the number of unemployed and online advertised vacancies stands at just over 5 million.

The lower demand is also keeping a downward pressure on the employment levels (Chart 2) which turned lower nine months ago in January 2008. "Once employer demand begins to turn upward, the employment trend should follow," said Levanon.

REGIONAL/STATE HIGHLIGHTS

Modest declines continued in the Northeast, Midwest and West regions, while the South showed an increase (Table A). The largest losses occurred in States impacted by the financial sector, including New York (-10,300), New Jersey (-7,700), Illinois (-7,900) and California (-23,800).

In the Northeast region, Massachusetts continues with an essentially flat trend, while Pennsylvania shows a slight increase following a string of declines. New York and New Jersey have now had two months of sizeable declines, with New Jersey now showing a downward trend in labor demand.

In the South, Maryland continued its upward trend (+1,900) with Georgia (+3,500) also showing an increase in labor demand this month. Texas was basically flat this month following a large September loss. Florida, which has seen losses in labor demand since May 2007, was little changed in October.

In the Midwest region, large October losses occurred in Illinois (-7,900), Missouri (-5,400) and Wisconsin (-5,000). All of these States also sustained large losses in September. Ohio and Minnesota showed increases in October, as did most of the other States in the region.

In the West, California continued its string of sizeable losses, while most other States in the region, such as Colorado and Washington, were about unchanged.

The downward trend in employer demand, coupled with the monthly increases in the unemployed, is creating a widening gap in the supply/demand balance in most States and making it increasingly difficult for the unemployed to find jobs. The Supply/Demand rate for the U.S. has been increasing and now stands at 2.15 or slightly over 2 unemployed for every online advertised vacancy.

The highest Supply/Demand rate is in Michigan (4.91) or almost 5 unemployed persons for every advertised vacancy. States where there are about 3 unemployed for every advertised vacancy include Ohio (3.19), North Carolina (3.03) and Florida (2.82). States with the lowest Supply/Demand rates include Maryland (1.14), Virginia (1.18), Massachusetts (1.29) and Colorado (1.32). In these States, the number of unemployed is roughly equal to the number of advertised vacancies.

It should be noted that the Supply/Demand rates only provide a measure of relative tightness of the individual State labor markets and do not suggest that the occupations of the unemployed directly align with the occupations of the advertised vacancies (see Occupational Highlights section).

OCCUPATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS

Since the beginning of the downturn in labor demand in May 2007, some occupations have been relatively unaffected while others have seen noticeable reductions in demand for workers.

Healthcare continues to be a strong area of demand with about the same number of advertised vacancies this October for healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (623,600) as last October. Advertised vacancies for healthcare support occupations were actually up by 11,100 to 110,000 over the year (Table B & Table 7). Healthcare as well as Education/Training occupations are fields that traditionally do well in both expansion and contraction periods. Similarly, the large Computer/Math occupations and Office/Administrative occupations have shown little impact thus far from the downturn. These occupations have a mixture of both high and medium pay with Supply/Demand rates that are in general much more favorable for employment than most occupations.

On the other side, high paying jobs in Management, Business/Finance and Architecture/Engineering occupations make up over 50% of the drop in over-the-year online advertised vacancies in October. The slowing economy has also negatively impacted other large occupational groups that are lower wage including Sales and Related Workers (-44,700 over-the-year), Transportation and Material Moving (-21,400) and Installation, Maintenance and Repair (-13,200).

METRO AREA HIGHLIGHTS

In October, 34 of the 52 metropolitan areas for which data is reported separately posted a decline in the number of online advertised vacancies from last October. The New York metro area continued to post the largest number of advertised vacancies (265,300), but had 42,200 fewer ads than in October 2007. Nine of the top 10 metropolitan areas with the largest number of ads posted fewer advertised vacancies in October than last October. Washington, DC, with 164,900 advertised vacancies, was the only exception.

Metro areas with over the year increases were widely distributed across the United States and included Honolulu, Indianapolis, Baltimore, Kansas City, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh and Virginia Beach, among others (Table 5 on pdf).

The five metro areas where the number of advertised vacancies exceeded the number of unemployed include Salt Lake City, Washington, DC, Milwaukee, Austin, and Oklahoma City. Metropolitan areas where the number of unemployed is about equal to the number of advertised vacancies include Baltimore, Seattle-Tacoma, Denver and Boston.

On the other hand, metro areas where the number of unemployed is substantially above the number of online advertised vacancies are Riverside, CA where there are about 7 unemployed persons for every advertised vacancy (6.9), Detroit (4.6), and Tampa (3.0).

PROGRAM NOTES

The Conference Board Help-Wanted Online Data Series™ measures the number of new, first-time online jobs and jobs reposted from the previous month on more than 1,200 major Internet job boards and smaller job boards that serve niche markets and smaller geographic areas.

Like The Conference Board's long running Help-Wanted Advertising Index of print ads (which has been published since 1951), the new online series is not a direct measure of job vacancies. The level of ads in both print and online may change for reasons not related to overall job demand.

With the October 1, 2008 release, HWOL began providing seasonally adjusted data for the U.S., the 9 Census regions and 50 States. This data series, for which the earliest data is May 2005, continues to publish not seasonally adjusted data for 52 large metropolitan areas and occupations. It is The Conference Board's intent to provide seasonally adjusted data for both large metro areas and occupations in the future.

Persons using this data are urged to review the information on the database and methodology available on The Conference Board website and contact the economists listed at the top of this release with questions and comments. Background information and technical notes on this new series are available at: http://www.conference-board.org/economics/helpwantedOnline.cfm.

The underlying data for this series is provided by Wanted Technologies Corporation. Additional information on the Bureau of Labor Statistics data used in this release can be found on the BLS website, www.bls.gov.

THE CONFERENCE BOARD

More information about The Conference Board.

WANTED Technologies Corporation.

WANTED is a leading supplier of real-time sales and business intelligence solutions for the media classified and recruitment industries. Using its proprietary On-Demand data mining, lead generation and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integrated technologies, WANTED aggregates real-time data from thousands of online job boards, real estate and newspaper sites, as well as corporate Web sites on a daily basis.

WANTED's data is used to optimize sales and to implement marketing strategies within the classified ad departments of major media organizations, as well as by staffing firms, advertising agencies and human resources specialists. For more information, please visit: www.wantedtech.com.

The next release is scheduled for Wednesday, December 3 at 10:00 AM ET.

For further information contact:
Frank Tortorici
(1) 212 339 0231
f.tortorici@conference-board.org

Gad Levanon
1 212 339 0317
gad.levanon@conference-board.org

June Shelp
1 212 339 0369
june.shelp@conference-board.org

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