Boulder-area hiring expected to be slightly better than rest of state
December 17, 2003
After weeks of being unemployed, Leo Soto said he's finding available jobs — but there's heavy competition for those positions.
Soto, a Littleton resident with 14 years experience in building maintenance, sat in the Broomfield Bolder Staffing office Friday afternoon talking with an employment coordinator about available positions.
"I've got resumes and applications from one end of the state to the other," he said.
According to a recent employment report, Soto might not find a better job market next quarter.
Denver metro area employers expect to hire at a sluggish pace during the first quarter of 2004, according to the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey.
Between January and March of next year, 17 percent of Denver companies plan to reduce their workforce, 51 percent expect to maintain their current staff levels, 17 percent are not certain of their hiring plans and 15 percent plan to hire more employees, according to the survey.
The survey did not track Broomfield hiring specifically, but did find that 33 percent of the Boulder-area companies it surveyed expect to add employees between January and March. That outpaces the 15 percent of Denver area firms who said the same, as well as the state average of 24 percent and the U.S. average of 20 percent.
Milwaukee-based Manpower polls nearly 16,000 companies across the country, including more than 100 in Colorado. It has done so every quarter for more than 40 years.
Jackie Osborn, co-owner of Bolder Staffing, said she hasn't heard reports from employers on hiring next quarter, but she expects the positive trends she's seen in fourth quarter will continue in the first quarter.
Bolder Staffing helps fill primarily industrial, clerical and technical positions in the North Denver area, Osborn said. Most people are looking for a job for between four to six months, Osborn said.
In the first quarter, many employers are in a wait-and-see mode and are reviewing their budgets and strategies for the year, Osborn said.
Kay Livingston Ash, vice president of Manpower's mountain region based in Denver, says manufacturers, wholesale and retail businesses, financial, insurance and real estate firms and service sectors all report either steady or improved hiring prospects for early next year in and around Boulder.
"It mirrors the uptick in our business," she said. "We're seeing considerably more orders than we were a year ago."
John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, an employment research and recruiting firm in Chicago, also expects to see hiring expansions. But he sees a subdued rate of growth.
For one, employers continue to ship U.S. jobs to other countries, as evidenced with Monday's news that IBM Corp. may ship up to 4,700 programming jobs overseas. In addition, more workers have been replaced by automated technology and remaining workers have increased their productivity, doing more around the clock for similar or lesser amounts of pay.
"We don't expect hiring to be explosive by any means, or job creation to be very strong," Challenger said, adding he doesn't anticipate robust hiring until the next cyclical economic expansion — probably at the end of the decade.
Unemployment continues to hover near 6 percent nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, although the number of unemployment claims last week was down from a year ago. Colorado's unemployment rate in October was 5.5 percent.
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