Metro jobless rate rises, but hiring trend positive

Metro Atlanta’s jobless rate ticked up at the start of the year as seasonal workers were laid off, but longer-term trends show an expanding economy that is adding jobs.

The unemployment rate has nearly always risen in the month after the holiday season. This time, the rate ratcheted up from 6.0 percent in December to 6.2 percent in January, according to the state Department of Labor.

More important, experts said: Since the start of last year, the region has added 104,400 jobs, the largest January-to-January growth on record, officials said.

While the U.S. jobless rate is lower, Atlanta is now out-pacing the rest of the nation and prospects for the near future are upbeat, said Alex Carrick, Chief Economist of Construction Market Data Group.

“You’ve got an economy that is clicking along very nicely.”

The January jobless report followed an economic forecast on Wednesday in which Georgia State University economists projected 2015 will produce the highest job creation number since 1999.

There is a lot of ground to make up. The nasty recession of 2007-07 and sluggish recovery left many jobseekers discouraged. When companies did hire, they could dip at will into a large pool of qualified candidates, setting their own terms for employment.

The hiring surge means that – at least in some sectors – the balance of power is shifting.

Better pay is increasingly part of the package needed to lure the right applicants, said Bruce Hagenau, president of Metcam Inc., an Alpharetta-based sheet metal fabrication company.

The company recently hired two managers, he said. “Finding people with experience and the right skill-sets is taking more time. I get the sense that they have more options than they did before.”

Yet overall, government data shows wages lagging despite the job growth.

“That is a conundrum,” said Russ Koesterich, global chief investment strategist for BlackRock, a New York-based asset manager.

The GSU forecast said wages still lag, and that fewer than a quarter of new metro Atlanta jobs in 2015 will be ‘premium.’

Wage stagnation can be explained partly by a surge in low-paying jobs, partly by technology soaking up jobs and partly by the increasingly intense competition that American workers face from lower-paid counterparts around the world, Koesterich said.

The distribution of income gains has also been skewed toward executives and shareholders.

However, the overall trend is not new, Koesterich said. “It is not a recession issue. That has been going on a long time. Wages for men have been going in the wrong director for about 40 years.”

Most economists expect more hiring to mean better pay.

Atlanta’s hiring has been broad-based with jobs in a number of sectors growing by 4 percent or more, including trade, transportation, and warehousing, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, education and health services and construction.

The hottest hiring has been in technology and financial services, said Andy Decker, regional vice president for staffing company Robert Half. “The best-skilled talent is getting harder to find.”

Still, 174,000 people in metro Atlanta are officially unemployed, an increase of 5,700 from December and a decrease of 22,000 from a year ago. Those numbers include only people who are actively seeking work, not those who have gone back to school, chosen to retire or just given up looking.

Perhaps more troubling, despite five years of recovery, the proportion of long-term jobless remains historically high: More than 40 percent of the state’s unemployed have been searching for work for at least six months, a share that has dipped only slightly.

Some of that is a kind of discord in skills, Decker said: “They are not matching up with the skills needed for the jobs that are open.” Some research also indicates a bias against long-term unemployed.