Published April 2004
Survey:
33% of employers plan to hire this spring
By
Mike Benbow
Herald Business Editor
Snohomish County
residents looking for work should find a much stronger job market this
spring.
That’s the prediction
from a new survey by Manpower Inc., an employment services company, and
from the Snohomish County office of Worksource, a state employment agency.
“In the past few
weeks we have had such a blur of activity,” said Jan Scudder, business
coordinator at Worksource. “It has just been amazing.”
About one of every
three Snohomish County employers surveyed by Manpower expects to hire
someone between April and June, the survey reported. About 7 percent intended
to reduce their work force, while 60 percent expected to maintain current
staffing levels, according to the survey. That’s good news for the area,
where unemployment was at 7.3 percent in January.
“Someone looking
for a job no doubt will have an easier time now than in recent memory,
than in the past two or three years,” said Jeffrey Joerres, Manpower’s
chief executive officer and chairman. “It’s still going to be difficult
in that companies are going to begin this process very cautiously.”
Nationally, about
one in four employers plan to add workers in the second quarter of the
year to keep pace with increased demand for their products or services,
according to the survey of 16,000 businesses released in March.
Locally, job prospects
appear best in construction, transportation, public utilities, finance,
insurance, real estate, education and services, according to the survey.
Scudder said employers
have already been looking for people in construction, landscaping, truck
driving and plumbing, jobs that typically open up in the spring. But the
openings this year are much broader, she said.
“There are a lot
of management positions, including some high-tech ones,” she said. “And
there’s a flurry of good office positions. That was a big layoff area.
They want bookkeepers and are filling some very good clerical jobs.”
She said there are
also positions for some engineers and machinists, areas where many people
were laid off by the Boeing Co. and other aerospace firms.
Job orders began
to pick up in February, but grew significantly in March, she said.
The Manpower results,
when seasonally adjusted, are the strongest since the first quarter of
2001, soon after the economy officially entered a recession. The number
of companies expecting to hire is nearly twice that of a year ago and
marks the third straight quarter of increased hiring projections, company
officials said.
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