According to the SHRM January 2010 Newsletter hiring will make moderate strides in January. Though Las Vegas job opportunities remain limited, January marks the third straight month on an annual basis that hiring will exceed layoffs in manufacturing and services.

(Source: SHRM Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE), shrm.org/line)

Job openings in both sectors are slowly rising. For the third consecutive month, vacancies rose from the previous year in December in all four job categories for manufacturing and services.

Compensation for new hires remains flat. For the second consecutive month, fewer than 3 percent of employers in both sectors increased wages and benefits packages for new hires in December.

In January, for the third month in a row, hiring will increase compared with the previous year.

While many economists expect high levels of unemployment to remain in the coming months, job seekers should have better prospects in January compared with a year ago. The hiring index is positive in both manufacturing and service sectors in January.

January marks the seventh straight month that more companies will add jobs than cut jobs in manufacturing and the ninth straight month that this has occurred in the service sector. It is also the third straight month that hiring has improved on an annual basis in both sectors.

Top-level talent is still available, but is getting harder to find for members of both sectors.

LINE’s recruiting difficulty index measures how difficult it is for firms to recruit candidates to fill the positions of greatest strategic importance to their companies. For the 10th consecutive month, this index recorded single- digit response levels for those reporting increased difficulty with recruiting. In the manufacturing sector, a net of 4.6 percent of companies reported less difficulty with recruiting (5.6 percent had increased difficulty, 10.2 percent had less difficulty). This still represents a net increase from December 2008, when a net of 16.3 percent reported less difficulty with recruiting.

The results may indicate that some categories of job seekers are finding jobs more quickly now than they were a year ago.

As with the past 18 months, it was not pretty.  Some of the key findings were:

• May hiring expectations will trail activity from a year ago
• November 2007 was the last month in which the LINE hiring index was positive
• Wages and benefits packages for new hires take a precipitous drop

Get a complete copy of the report here.

I can only imagine if this began to happen……..

(Note:  The Onion is one of the country’s finest purveyors of fake news.)

Nevada lost its bragging rights.  For the past 23 years we have said we were the fastest growing state in the union.  (Well….22 years.  Arizona snuck in there one year, but we all decided that they didn’t count the numbers right that year).

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Nevada grew just 1.8 percent.  Utah took the lead with 2.5% growth.

Read the article in the Las Vegas Sun.

The latest Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) LINE (Leading Indicators for National Employment) Report for October was release today.  Here are the highlights:

• Fewer payrolls are expanding. Both manufacturing
  and service-sector employment expectations are at the
  lowest October levels in four years.
• A weak overall labor market may be leading to fewer
  job vacancies. Exempt vacancies are down significantly
  in both sectors, while nonexempt vacancies are down in
  manufacturing and fall to unprecedented levels in the
  service sector.
• It is getting easier to find qualified candidates.
  Recruiting difficulty has eased to four-year lows as HR
  professionals are having more success finding top talent.

A complete copy of the report can be downloaded here.