Unemployed outnumbering jobs in Tampa Bay

From Bizjournals.com:
http://www.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2009/02/02/daily9.html

Job hunting for many Tampa Bay area residents may be more arduous than they thought.

A new study from The Conference Board and Wanted Technologies Corp. shows that there are 3.3 unemployed people for every online advertised job vacancy. That is slightly below numbers for Miami but ahead of Florida, which had 4.2 unemployed people for every help wanted ad.

“The very sharp declines in advertised vacancies throughout the nation in the last two months are clearly making it increasingly hard for those who are unemployed to find new positions,” said Gad Levanon, senior economist at The Conference Board, in a release.

Nationally, online advertised job vacancies fell 506,000 to 3.36 million in January. Combined with the 507,000 drop in December, ads have fallen by more than 1 million, or 23 percent in the last two months. Florida lost 25,200 job ads in January, behind only Texas in the south.

The industries hardest hit in terms of job vacancies losses are transportation and material moving, office and administrative support, legal, business and finance, and construction. Health care support also declined but at a much slower pace.

The Conference Board Help-Wanted Online Data Series measures the number of new, first-time online jobs and jobs reposted from the previous month on more than 1,200 Internet job boards and smaller job boards that serve niche markets and smaller geographic areas.

I’m seeing this in a lot of instances, both online and off. A year back, when I had 3 jobs and was making good money, I could get most any job I applied for. These days, trying to find extra work seems impossible. I’ve put out resumes to over 100 jobs in the last 2 months. Full time, part time, in industries ranging from marketing to sales to information technology to labor. No one is hiring.

One place I applied at recently told me that they had over 300 applications for this one job, as a $8/hour marketing support person! That’s craziness. I would only use this job to supplement my current income, but it’s absolutely nuts to me that someone would work for $8/hour in a job that really needs 10 years experience and a college degree.

So, the search goes on. At least I’m not alone.

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