Metro Atlanta jobless rate tumbles

Metro Atlanta’s unemployment rate dropped in November by the biggest amount in 20 years, according to the state, as businesses in a range of sectors reported modest hiring.

“We are not calling it a trend, but we are calling it very good news,” Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said Thursday. “I think we will see some ups and downs over the next few months. . . If we have four to five months like this, we are looking at calling it a trend.”

The area’s jobless rate fell from 9.9 percent in October to 9.2 percent last month, the Labor Department said. The area added more than 13,000 jobs in areas including transportation, health care and financial services.The last time the rate dropped by as much was in April 1991, the agency said.

One of the people behind the numbers is Dotan Zuckerman, a real estate agent who searched for a full-time position for four years to no avail. In between, he closed independent deals, but the business was inconsistent and he never knew when he would get his next paycheck.

Zuckerman finally landed a job as a leasing agent for Atlantic Station.

“The big companies weren’t hiring. Instead, they were letting people go. Even when I got this job, they had hundreds of resumes they were going through.”

“The moral of this story is that a lot of hard work will pay off,” he said.

The November decline tracks with similar drops in Georgia and nationally. Seasonal retail hiring can play a role, but the drop puts metro Atlanta’s rate more than a full point below November 2010’s mark of 10.3 percent.

Roger Tutterow, an economist at Mercer University, said November’s numbers demonstrate that Atlanta is moving in the right direction, especially compared to last year.

“This is certainly progress and is consistent with we what we are seeing across the state and nationally,” he said.

Still, he said he will wait to judge the strength of a possible recovery until the number of retail jobs is taken out of the equation. He also expects that the metro area will continue to bounce back more slowly than other parts of the nation because the area’s economy was so tied to construction and financial services.

Butler said holiday hiring is not the key factor in the decline.

“People say that the number is down because of Christmas retail hiring. But less than half of (hiring) is what we associate with seasonal or retail hiring,” he said. “We saw a lot of hiring in other areas, say for health care, education, business and professional services. And also one that really caught our attention was financial services.”

Despite the improved numbers, the search goes on for people like Liz Hickok. A human services director laid off this summer, Hickok turned the Christmas decorations on her house into an employment search billboard.

Along with a snowman, shrubs lined with lights and decorative window wreaths, Hickok added a plea in lights: “My Wish -- HR Job. Liz Hickok -- Linked In.”

“It just made sense to try another modality and pair it with my Christmas lights,” said Hickok, who has gotten a lot of response from both potential employers and the media. “I thought of it as a way to demonstrate my creative side to problem solving.”

To install the sign she used about 500 lights, each of which had to be individually tied to make the design work. The display has gone bi-coastal, with a former neighbor telling her that friends in Oregon, her new home, had heard about it.