Employers mostly seek temporary workers

By MICHAEL E. KANELL

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Metro Atlantans are waiting for signs.

The economy is struggling out of recession, experts say, but real improvement comes at street level.

James Higginbotham of Locust Grove isn’t seeing it yet. The 26-year-old sheet-metal worker was laid off in May and has been searching for a job since. With the construction collapse, demand for his skills is weak.

“I’ve got a list of places,” he said. “I go through it. Nobody I called is hiring.”

To save money, he and his wife and their two toddlers moved from a $700-a-month home to a more affordable trailer. Last week, his wife was laid off from her job at a day care center. He gets $355 a week in unemployment benefits, he said.

“That ain’t enough to support my family.”

Where will the signs come from?

Staffing companies are often seen as the leading edge of the job market, said Judith Clark, director of public relations for Kelly Services.

“Typically staffing is the first to be let go and now, you will see an uptick in staffing before the rest of the market,” she said.

The good news right now is that things aren’t getting worse, she said. “I am very optimistic about the job market. It seems to have leveled off. It seems to have stabilized.”

Emily Carlson, area vice president for north Atlanta for Randstad, another staffing company, said some businesses are seeing more demand for products.

Unfortunately, when they call staffing companies, they ask mostly for temporary or “contract” workers, she said.

“Companies are not ready to commit to permanent head count. So this helps them to staff up. Wait and see is the game we are in right now.”

The signal she is waiting for is the moment when companies choose “temp-to-perm” — when they take contract workers with the understanding that a good worker will be hired.

“That would be a signal that companies are much more encouraged,” Carlson said.

Manila Sisamouth, 39, would love a chance to sign on permanently. The Roswell woman has a six-month contract as an operations analyst for a large insurance company.

It took six months to land that slot, she said. “There was a lot of competition — people applying for the same job. It does add to the stress.”

The company that matched her to the job, Alpharetta-based SiriusWorks, focuses on information technology. Not that long ago, that sector was holding up better than most. When the recession deepened a year ago, cost-cutting caught up to technology.

“It wasn’t instantaneous where all of a sudden we had nothing — we did see more contract positions,” said Jane Smith, vice president SiriusWorks. “I thought in April or May that we might be out of the woods, but then it went down again.”

Lately, SiriusWorks has gotten five to 10 requests each week from companies that want positions filled.

“If we have 20 open requisitions, then we know that the economy is coming back,” Smith said. “But that has to happen week after week.”

Some increased hiring has come from call centers and customer service offices, especially among insurance and financial companies, as well as some light manufacturing, said Beth Herman, regional director for Manpower Inc. “We are not ready to say it’s a recovery. We may be reaching a shelf.”

The signal she’s looking for?

“We will feel confident when the clients say, ‘We are at full capacity. We’ve got orders in the queue. We have orders in bulk. It’s time to hire.’ ”

Even in a recession, some people do get hired. But one mark of a dismal job market is how long it takes to land a job. Another is how often job-seekers settle for lower pay or a lesser position.

Ron Farley, 43, of Jonesboro, was laid off from a job writing software code a couple weeks before last Christmas.

With no income — his wife was still in school — he started to file for bankruptcy. Before he did, he hooked a job driving a shuttle bus at the airport.

“I went from making $80,000 a year to $7.25 an hour,” he said. “I said, $7-an-hour is better than zero. A job is a job. Nothing is below me.”

He carried resumés with him, passing them out to passengers. After a few months of shuttle-driving, he found a tech job.

Not all the signposts come right out and say “jobs,” said Tom Smith, labor economist and professor of finance at Emory’s Goizueta Business School.

When business is slow, companies often sell product out of inventories. Even if a spate of new orders comes in, they might fill them from inventory. But if they think the spurt will continue, they must bump up production.

That is a sign that soon they must hire, too, Smith said. “First, you will see inventories start to dip.”

Many experts who think the recession is over also predict a slow, ragged recovery.

Right now, the job market is like a badly organized game of musical chairs: Job-seekers outnumber openings by an average of six to one, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Those odds discourage many job-seekers.

Some head back to school in the hopes of waiting out the storm, adding a skill that can get them hired or a start on their own business.

The unemployment rate is based on the number of people looking for a job. The calculation doesn’t count full-time students, stay-at-home-with-kids parents, people who print up cards and call themselves self-employed or anyone who has given up looking for work.

To get a picture that includes those people, economists compare the number of people in the labor force to the size of the non-institutionalized civilian population. The most recent data shows that ratio has fallen to its lowest level since 1987. It would take a return of 1.2 million people into the workforce to raise the current rate of 65.5 percent back to pre-recession levels.

Watch that number, suggested Smith.

“When people think the economy is improving, they start to jump back into the labor force.”

Their optimism ironically will make other numbers look worse, he said. “You’ll see the labor force participation start to climb and you may get an increase in the unemployment rate, too.”