Jobless Claims Down

The Labor Department is reporting that for the week ending Feb.14 new jobless claims dropped significantly, posting their largest decline since November.

Now I'm not going to sit here this morning and analyze how this might fit into the overall ecnomic environment. There are enough other blogs, along with CNBC, MSNBC, FOXNews, CNN, and the major networks who will be doing that. Instead I'm going to take a different approach.

Let me begin by stating that I believe that the job market is starting to improve - just a little bit. Many of my longtime readers may recall that back around July of last year I started looking for a new job. It wasn't until Mid-November that I was able to find anything that was a step up. It essentially took me nearly 5 moths to find a new job - and I was employed at the time, which supposedly makes it easier to get a new job.

Now since November, I've received another job offer, for significantly more money and better benefits, and was felt out about yet another. Since last July, I have gone from being extraordinarily unlucky to extraordinarily lucky. Nothing has really changed in my approach (although I have not actively sought a new job since November). But something has begun to change in the job market.

I think that right now what we're beginning to see is a move towards bringing in new people in the revenue producing segments of businesses. Salespeople, manufacturing people, and customer service positions all seem to be in a little bit of demand right now.

This is great and wonderful, but most of the unemployed at the moment seem to be from support positions, IT particularly. Those types of positions are not being created just yet. So support staff candidates are going without offers.

Now some will argue that the job that are being created now are the low eage positions. And that, by and large, is true. But in order for there to be a need for support staff, there needs to be a staff to support.

I think that a lot of companies learned a very tough lesson back in the late '90s. The last brokerage firm I worked for went on a hiring spree from 1996-1999 and more than quadrupled the size of the company - and then from 2001-2003 they let go basically everyone they hired, plus some. It was a painful lesson for them. And I think that right now, there are a number of companies that are trying to take too much away from that experience. In an effort to make sure they won't have to let people go, they are foregoing revenue and profits to avoid hiring people.

In the late '90s the hiring pendulum was at one extreme, where anybody could get a job in very short order, regardless of anything. In the last 2 or 3 years, we've been at the other extreme, where very few could get a job, no matter how well qualified they might be. At both extremes, the job market was operating very inefficiently and companies have paid a price, either in realized layoffs or unrealized profits.

My sense, and I have nothing really to back it up with it is just a gut feeling, is that things are starting to return to a more normal state. It should be interesting to see how long it takes for hiring to really return to normal.