This morning came a report from the Conference Board that is the new version of the old “Help Wanted” Index.  There is still a gain in online job postings since March of 35,000, but the reading in June showed a drop of 66,700 to just over 3.294 million.

The report notes that the drop in total online jobs are down a modest 71,000 since January.  The reason that is considered modest is because the five- month period before that from August 2008 to January 2009 was a loss of 1.2 million online job postings.

The breakdown in the ratio in individual states shows just how dire the situation is in certain geographies.  The number of advertised vacancies to total unemployed was 2-to-1 in Maryland, yet 1o-t0-1 in Michigan.  Some 24 states had increases in postings, while 26 states had declines.  But the declines were in all four U.S. regions: 3,400 in the South,  18,100 in the Northeast, 13,400 in the Midwest, and 10,300 in the West.

So much for sales and IT leading us out of the jobs drop through.  Almost half of the 66,700 declines in June in online advertised vacancies were in sales and IT:  Computer and Mathematical Science were -19,900, while Sales and Related were -11,700.

The ratio of the unemployed to number of job postings showed which cities had it the worst:  Riverside, CA was 9.7-to-1, Detroit was 9.6-to-1, Portland was 5.9 to 1, Sacramento was 5.6-to-1, Chicago was 5.4-to-1, Miami was 5.3- to-1, and Los Angeles was 5.0-to-1.

While the focus of this is still negative and while there aren’t many green shoots, this still represents what looks to be a compression in the rate of change.  Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board, was quoted as saying, “We are not out of the woods yet, but job demand has definitely stabilized since January…. Although there is some bounce in the monthly numbers, the number of online advertised vacancies has held steady in the last three months…”

There is also an obvious situation here: online jobs advertised are not necessarily a matching of skills for those who are unemployed and are not necessarily in the same pay range as those skills would command.  A skilled factory worker could still end up locally with the best opportunity being that of a hamburger flipper.

The march continues on…

Jon C. Ogg
June 29, 2009

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