All around this great country of ours there are signs that the US economy is still recovering. Maybe not as much as we would have liked, or as fast as we would have liked, or to the levels we would have liked, but recovering none-the-less.
Our last post was about companies who have decided it could be a good idea to re-hire some of those employees who were lost to them during the economic downturn.In fact, there were, and perhaps still are, companies who previously had a no re-hire policy in effect. There were also companies who decided anyone who had been out of the active job market for more then six months was not a good hire. Both of which are very short sighted ways of looking at people.
As the job pool of qualified people gets smaller, employers are going to be forced to become more flexible in their hiring practices, and that is, in many cases, a win-win for each side. The Business section of the Orange County Register just published a post about the Unemployment rate in Orange County:
“The county’s economy performed better than California’s overall, where the jobless rate dipped to a seasonally adjusted 5.2 percent in May from 5.3 percent.
However, Northern California, with its booming high-tech industries, remained the state’s most dynamic region, as unemployment dipped below 3 percent last month in several counties.
U.S. joblessness was 4.7 percent.
“Orange County is doing extremely well,” said Chapman University economist Raymond Sfeir. “A 3.6 unemployment rate means it will get tougher for businesses to find new employees.”
As the market tightens, Sfeir predicted, employers will need to raise wages, which have stagnated during the economic recovery for middle- and lower-income workers.
“The hope is that more people will return to the labor force as wages rise and increases in the minimum wage take effect,” he added. In Orange County, the labor force, which includes those working and those looking for work, grew by half a percentage point year-over-year, still less than the population growth of nearly 1 percent a year.
At a career fair Wednesday sponsored by the Register’s Top Workplaces program, Nicole Emfinger, an Irvine recruiter for staffing agency Superior Group, collected 40 résumés for tech-related jobs. “Employers need to move fast on interviewing skilled talent,” she said. “It is a very competitive market.”
That doesn’t mean that every person who has a job is employed to their fullest potential, so there is still room for improvement for some people who are still not employed to their full potential, but this current unemployment rate is lower than it has been in such a long time.
There are also a great number of new startup companies who are now using our service as Virtual Receptionist for their company,, which we are pretty certain are not reflected in the current unemployment figures.
Things are looking up here in the OC, how are they doing in your neck of the woods?
Central Comm Editor
