WHAT'S THE JOB MARKET LIKE RIGHT NOW In my role as a third party recruiter, the most asked question I get is, "what is the job market like right now?"
Before I attempt to reply to the, "what is the market like right now?" question I want to preference my answer by stating that I recruit almost exclusively for the plastics industry but having just returned from a meeting with 131 other third party recruiters in Chicago who work various industries, I have a pretty good idea of the overall market.
According to the October 18, 2004 issue of the PLASTICS NEWS, the United States Plastics Industry has lost approximately 100,000 positions since 2000. I believe the majority of those positions have been in the executive and management and sales areas. This might not seem important to many of you but the plastics industry is the fourth largest manufacturing employer in the United States. I am having little trouble finding jobs for plastic process engineers, technicians, supervisors, etc. I am having more trouble finding solid qualified candidates.
The hottest hiring market right now, to no one's surprise, is Healthcare. Many third party recruiters have left the IT and many manufacturing areas to join in the placement of Healthcare professionals.
Hiring in the IT industry is still slow put picking up, however, chip and PC manufacturing hiring is still very slow as more and more manufacturing moves to the Far East and Mexico.
Surprisingly hiring in the steel and aluminum manufacturing industries has increased significantly.
Hiring in the technical sectors of the Automotive Industry is very strong but still slow in the management and executive ranks.
This is just a small sample of what I have seen. The most interesting feature of the present hiring scene is that companies believe that this is a buyer's market and candidates believe it is a seller's market, making this one of the more difficult markets to place people I have ever seen. There is so much flux in the manufacturing sector it is difficult to get a real gauge on what exactly is happening as the follow excerpt from CNNmoney.com indicates:
"The Conference Board reported that of the 5,000 people surveyed earlier this month, more think jobs are hard to find -- 28.3 percent --
than say jobs are plentiful -- 16.8 percent.
But economists surveyed by Reuters estimated that employers add 155,000 jobs to their payrolls this month......."
My only answer to the question "what is the market like right now?, is -- it all depends.
10:57:15 PM 
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