John Challenger chose an interesting way to describe Friday’s November employment report from the Labor Department.
“It’s a horrendous tsunami of a report,” said Challenger, chief executive of global outplacement consultancy firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
“It gives concrete evidence of how deep the recession has become,” Challenger said. “It really illustrates what the last quarter has been all about. It was a devastating report.”
For job-seekers and employers, after taking in all the bad news, all they can do now is look forward, Challenger said.
“In every recession, it’s the staples that people can’t do without,” Challenger said. “Those are the sectors that will survive better than others.”
Health care, education, agriculture and discount retail and hospitality businesses will do better than others, Challenger said.
And, believe it or not, there are job openings out there. Maryland was one of the few states across the country that saw its number of online job advertisements increase in November, according to The Conference Board.
The state had about 3,500 new online job advertisements from October to November. Overall across the country, online advertised vacancies declined by 70,200 to about 4.4 million in November, according to The Conference Board.
“Some of the largest current decline is in business, financial and management occupations,” Gad Levanon, senior economist at The Conference Board, said in a statement. “Health care workers, however, are still in demand.”
It’s not just a difficult time for those who have lost their job, Challenger said. The recession causes stress for employers, who, if they haven’t already made jobs cuts, will likely consider them before entering what’s sure to be a tumultuous 2009.
And for the employees who remain working after significant cuts, they likely deal with a combination of emotions, Challenger said.
“There’s that survivor syndrome that develops,” Challenger said. “Then work goes undone, because one person is asked to do the work of three people. There’s frustration, guilt and fear. This is what happens during a recession.”
On the hiring side, just 2 percent of chief financial officers in the Baltimore area expect to add finance and accounting staff in the first quarter of next year, while 9 percent expect to cut jobs, according to a survey conducted by New York-based staffing services firm Robert Half International.
About 87 percent of respondents anticipate no change in hiring.
