With the economy in a downward slump, many employers simply aren’t hiring. Some of the few that are simply can’t afford to pay the cost of announcing their vacancies on major job search websites. Because of this, finding jobs online has gotten increasingly more difficult over the last few months.
According to The Conference Board’s Help-Wanted Online Data Series (HWOL) the nation lost a total of 6,600 job vacancies advertised on the Internet during February. This brought the number of original help-wanted ads down to 3,348,00 for the month, which means that there were approximately a little more than 2 jobs posted online for every 100 people in the country’s workforce last month. During the same month last year there were just over 3 ads per every 100 workers.
Although this decline is still significant, it is less drastic to that experienced during January and December. In the first month of this year, employers posted 506,000 fewer jobs than they did in December. The last month of 2008 saw a decline of 507,000 available job posted online, which brought the combined total of job ads lost between the two months to 1,020,000. This means that there were 23 percent fewer help-wanted announcements to be found on the Web.
“The good news is that labor demand was basically flat in February; the bad news is that we are still at the lowest level since the data series on online labor demand began in 2005,” said The Conference Board’s Senior Economist Gad Levanon in a recent press release. “Advertised vacancies are a leading indicator of movements in employment several months from now. It’s nice to see labor demand hold steady for even one month, but the economy is still hurting for weakened consumer demand (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index is at an all-time low) and continued crisis in the financial markets.”
The Conference Board data shows that the decline in jobs posted online during February occurred, for a large part, in the South and West. The online labor demand in the Northeast and Midwest saw an increase. For the most part the most heavily populated states throughout all of the regions, except those in the West, saw a small increase. Despite this, the data shows that the longer-term trend for all four regions and all of the 20 largest states in the country is down.
According The Conference Board, there were 8.3 million more unemployed workers looking for jobs in January than there were positions advertised online. At the time the release was published the numbers for February had yet to be released by the Federal Government, but since unemployment is expected to continue to rise, the gap between the supply and demand will likely only continued to grow.