June was a weak month for hiring in metro Atlanta as the region’s unemployment rate ticked up from 5.9 percent to 6 percent, the state labor department announced Thursday.
The metro economy shed 3,500 jobs – twice as many as usual — and layoffs jumped 14 percent during the month, with cuts in both public and private sectors, Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said.
Still, the region has added 77,300 jobs in the past year, so June’s stumble should be temporary, Butler said.
“Most of the job loss we saw last month was centered around government and education and health services. A lot of that is going to be seasonal in nature.”
The month is typically a slow one, as schools shed employees and many companies delay hiring.
The metro Atlanta rate is not adjusted to smooth out those kinds of seasonal changes. If the jobless rate for Georgia were also unadjusted, it would have risen from 6.1 percent to 6.4 percent in June. The seasonally adjusted state rate dipped from 6.3 to 6.1 percent.
Some sectors have been growing, including professional and business services and information technology.
Much of the fastest growth has come from smaller tech companies. And while many workers have struggled, various kinds of engineers have increasingly been in demand.
“I think the tech job market is getting tight,” said Paul Carmody, chief executive of four-year-old AchieveIt. “It is really pretty competitive.”
AchieveIt makes software meant to make companies more productive by honing the way employees work together. The company has tripled in size since last fall to 36 employees, Carmody said.
A recent hire, Andrew Brown, 28, of Mableton, graduated from Georgia Tech in 2010 when the job market – even for engineers – was still struggling to emerge from the depths of recession.
“I can tell you, it took me awhile to get a job,” he said. “I got a lot of, “Well maybe,’ and then eventually, ‘No.’”
Taylor Holden, 24, of Brookhaven, graduated from Tech three years later and had plenty of offers before taking a programmer’s job at AchieveIt, he said. “It seems like the tech side of Atlanta has really growth these last few years.”
Hiring in the tech sector is part of a longer, positive trajectory for the metro Atlanta economy: the unemployment rate has come down from a peak of 10.6 percent in 2010. A year ago, the jobless rate was 7.3 percent.
The improvement has been uneven, however.
At the low end, the jobless rate in Forsyth County is 4.8 percent, in Cherokee 5 percent, in Cobb 5.4 percent.
At the other end, Newton County unemployment is 7 percent and Clayton’s rate is 7.9 percent.
Moreover, job growth has just not been fast enough to soak up all the unemployed in addition to new job-seekers coming out of school or moving into the region.
Six years after the end of the recession, metro Atlanta still has 170,160 people out of work and looking for a job, according to government figures – lower than a year ago, but 23 percent higher than before the recession.
Metro Atlanta now has slightly fewer people employed than it did seven years ago as the recession was taking hold. And while the June increase in the unemployment rate was less than average for the month, it could have been larger: 8,781 people left the workforce, so they were not counted as jobless.
The metro Atlanta jobless rate has not been below the national average since December 2007, when it was 4.9 percent.
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