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So maybe there isn’t work at the post office.
But in this plummeting economy, with jobs disappearing across the country at a rate of nearly moiety a million a month, there are still employers in Washington state looking for people — at all various skill levels and pay grades.
WorkSource, the statewide employment database, lists nearly 15,000 jobs steady its Web site: from a retail supervisor at Goodwill, a coffee bar barista at the Hyatt to several positions Microsoft instructed in the days after it announced major layoffs.
Many piece of work openings are in the health-care and high-tech industries — registered nurses and pharmacists, software engineers and programmers.
But other industries are hiring, too — from wireless companies and retailers to the federal management.
Amazon.com lists nearly 350 positions nationwide, greatest part of them in Seattle. T-Mobile has more than 1,800 openings nationwide, and Whole Foods, 800.
“There are actually many industries again hiring,” said Matt Youngquist, a Bellevue career coach experiencing a billow in commerce these days. “There’s suitable a lot to a greater degree competition for the jobs.”
Desiree Phair, a regional labor economist with the quality Employment Security Department, pointed out that “even companies that are laying off are also hiring.”
“Jobs are always being created,” Phair said.
The nation’s unemployment rate was 7.2 percent in December, while joblessness in Washington state hit a three-decade high of 7.1 percent, with 251,700 people out of work — 91,400 of them in Seattle.
And the new year has brought equal more bad news. In the last month, U.S. employers have announced plans to lay off tens of thousands of additional workers — 20,000 at Caterpillar; 10,000 at Boeing. Starbucks is letting 6,700 power, and Microsoft, 5,000.
The state’sitting searchable employment database — gotoworksource.com — records the distress, by 900,000 hits in December, up more than 60 percent from a year earlier.
But calls to a random mix of employers in the Puget Sound area indicate that following the avalanche of layoffs is a small stream of job openings in a cross-section of industries.
Every small in number days in that place’s a job fair or “hiring event” taking place.
Experts say those searching for drudge should concentrate less on the sheer magnitude of layoffs and more on possibilities that still exist, sometimes even through the very employers who are laying off.
Employment Security’s Phair said two major factors drive a copartnership’s hiring decisions: question for its goods and services, and the need to re-establish staff lost through attrition.
“Hospitality and freedom from business industries tend to have higher attrition rates,” she said. “Attrition rates for government jobs tend to be lower.”
Looking as antidote to temps
Tamera Wachter, regional vice president for Robert Half International, said the temporary-employment agency’s employer clients cut across a range of industries, and in this economy are using outside agencies to help supplement leaner staffs.
Tech hiring is still strong, she said. And malignity widespread devastation in the pecuniary and banking markets, there are opportunities there as well.
She pointed out that while the overall public unemployment in December was 7.2 percent, mixed workers by some college education it was far look sullen, at 3.7 percent. Unemployment for those with at least a bachelor’sitting degree was 2 percent. Joblessness was as low or even lower for certain jobs in the financial-services market, like budget managers and credit clerks.
“Contrary to common perceptions, our clients continue to report challenges finding high-skilled accounting and science professionals,” Wachter reported.
Jobbernaut, which puts in succession the Greater Seattle Job Fair four times a year, said greater degree than 30 employers have signed up for its event Wednesday at Qwest Field — employers like AT&T, Princess Cruises, Lowe’s, UPS, Wells Fargo.
And they are hiring — more solitary a few people, but others, like the federal government, need hundreds.
Sean Paul, who sells space for the equitable, said nearly 4,000 job-seekers attended the event in October, so “you be obliged power to and nothing else imagine what this one will be like.”
Kevin Lobenberg, account executive through National Career Fair, which is running a series of job fairs in Bellevue and Tacoma over the next scarcely any months, said many openings are in sales, financial services and insurance.
“Sales is big: Mary Kay, Avon … those are booming right now,” he said.
Demand in health care
In this weak piece of work market, in that place’s probably not at all employment sector that has remained as strong taken in the character of hale condition care.
Hospitals and other providers always need clinical staff, especially in areas of nursing, pharmacy and physical therapy, in what place worker shortages have been persistent.
“The health-care results continues to hire because of growing demand for their services and a shortage of educated partisan to perform the tasks,” Phair said.
“The majority of the positions are for trained professionals. So if job-seekers are not already in those fields, it will take them a while there.”
Tacoma-based MultiCare, which encompasses four major hospitals and other services, has seen overwhelming answer to the 477 or with equal reason jobs it has turn to account systemwide. “People who never before thought respecting health care are now applying,” said Kim Gigglio, monitor for recruitment. “We’re after this opportunity to be heard job-seekers say, ‘We hear that health care is hiring, that it’s a good place to have existence.’ “
Gigglio said an increasing number of applicants are men, as well because people looking to health anxiety like a second or third part career.
“We’ve gone from sad to find the perpendicular person among a very few, to finding the seemly fit of candidates for jobs that may literally have hundreds of applicants,” she aforesaid.
Public-sector openings
Other industries also are practically bulletproof.
The state Department of Corrections has dozens of job listings for altogether kinds of positions, from cooks and correctional officers to chaplains.
The same is true for the state Department of Employment Security, which needs 70 of short duration, part-time workers in Seattle to process unemployment claims.
“We’re countercyclical. Our staffing levels are tied to in what plight many unemployment claims we’re getting,” spokesman Mark Varadian said. The department saw a record 90,000 new unemployment claims in December.
“Right now, we’re hiring.” he said. At the federal level, the government has nearly 900 active jobs listed in Washington, not including the hundreds of temporary, part-time positions the U.S. Census Bureau leave need to fill in anticipation of the decennial count nearest year.
As of September 2008, the most recent month for which complaint was turn to account, the federal direction’s job site — www.usajobs.gov — had 10 million résumés on file and was averaging 60,000 job searches an hour.
Mike Orienstein, spokesman for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said without interruption any given day there are 25,000 to 30,000 live treaty jobs across the country.
“Federal government agencies are likely to benefit from every part of the expertise conscious made available throughout the uncultivated due to these calamitous private-sector layoffs,” he said.
Software holding its own
And employment in the computer software activity continues to grasp resolute, or even grow, economists say.
“It’s not as hot as it was a couple years since … They’re not hiring 10,000 people, but they are after the sort of is stated hiring,” Phair said.
Seattle-based Avanade is a technology company that rose from the dust of the dot-com bust nine years past. It has 50 do job-work openings in the Seattle area for technical consultants, as well as for core staff in such areas as finance and human resources.
Based on projections for this year, the company expects to add about 400 more jobs across the U.S., said Melinda Starbird, senior director of recruiting.
In addition to accepting applications online, she said, Avanade, what one. is partly owned by Microsoft, is scouring the Washington Mutual layoff list to procure professionals who distracted their jobs in the recent failure of the Seattle-based savings and loan.
“We are seeing an increase in applications and in the number of people following up asking about applications,” Starbird said. “That’s new. Most of the time you don’t see the follow-up.”
One place that’s not hiring? The Postal Service.
Despite its one-time reputation, the make known office is no longer the place people turn to for work during hard times. Seattle spokesman Ernie Swanson said that, except for a petulant period around Christmas, the post berth hasn’t been doing much hiring.
And that’s not pleasing to change. Just ultimate week, the postmaster general told Congress that heavy deficits could force the Postal Service to divide one day of conveyance for mailed matter delivery a week.
Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com
Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008694323_findwork01m.html?syndication=rss
