Help Wanted: Hiring Improves Across the Board

The jobs recovery has been spotty so far but a new report shows hiring is up across the board.

Job listings were up in May from a year earlier in all 12 industries tracked by Indeed.com, a search engine for job listings.

“It’s a very encouraging sign — it’s the first time we’ve seen all 12 industries showing year-over-year growth,” said Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed.com. “There was quite a bit of seasonal hiring earlier this year and now that’s translating into more permanent hires,” Forster said.

Transportation saw the biggest increase, according to Indeed.com, with listings up a whopping 67 percent from last year.

This was particularly encouraging, considering that some economists expect the government report to show most of the hiring in May was for census workers.

“We’ve seen quite a strong recovery in manufacturing, which is fed through transportation,” Forster explained. “It’s an industry that has a lot of leverage — once economic activity returns, demand for transportation increases.”

Most of that is hiring drivers — three out of five of the top transportation-job titles included the word “drivers.” There is also strong demand for help in warehouses.

The top cities for transportation job listings were Houston, Atlanta and New York City.

Retail and hospitality rounded out the top three industries showing the biggest increases in hiring.

“These sectors had a strong bounceback because they did particularly badly during the recession,” Forster said. “On the other end of the scale, health care has hardly shown any increase over last year because they never really went into recession in that industry,” Forster said.

Retail listings jumped 53 percent from last year. Customer-service representatives were in the most demand, followed by marketing coordinators and marketing managers.

And hospitality listings jumped 49 percent as more hotels and restaurants ramped up hiring for the summer travel season. Housekeepers, cooks and restaurant managers are among the most in demand.

The top cities for hiring in both retail and hospitality were New York, Atlanta and Chicago.

This comes after employer-services firm ADP reported that private companies added 55,000 jobs to their payrolls in May and outsourcing consultant Challenger reported planned layoffs were down 65 percent in May from a year earlier.

The numbers are closely watched ahead of the government’s May employment report, due out on Friday. Economists expect to see 513,000 jobs were added to nonfarm payrolls last month, after a 290,000 increase in the prior month.

Social media is an increasingly important part of hiring, with Twitter, Facebook, iPhone , blogger and social media among the top 10 words appearing in job listings. Among the others were cloud computing, corporate social responsibility and pediatrician.

Overall, the cities with the best odds for getting a job are Washington, DC, and San Jose, Calif., according to the latest geographic employment report from Indeed, which was for April. Those cities have one unemployed person per job listing. Miami and Los Angeles were the worst, with 8 or more unemployed people for each job listing.

“There’s definitely still some nervousness” among hiring managers, Forster said. “But I think it’s tempered — there’s generally a lot more optimism than there was six months ago.”

“I think it’s a good prognosis — a positive first sign for the future,” he said.

Copyright CNBC
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