Manpower Outlook: Hiring Ahead for Those with the Right Stuff

The latest Manpower Employment Outlook Survey provides a comprehensive look at future national hiring trends, and it provides interesting projections, especially for those in IT, health care, engineering, truck driving, and welding. Overall, 21% of employers who resonded to the survey said they plan to be hiring in the upcoming fourth quarter.

Manpower's seasonally adjusted net-employment numbers measure the percentage of firms planning to hire minus those intending layoffs. It doesn't measure the number of jobs.

One Manpower official quoted in The Wall Street Journal Online says the trend will be for "precise hiring."

"For the right skills at the right price, employers are looking to hire, and there's nothing that they've seen that shakes that intent," he said. "Neither gas prices nor inflation fears nor other issues which are hot topics in the news right now seem to have shaken their confidence to the extent that they're scaling back on their intent to hire," says Jonas Prising, Manpower's president for the North America region.

Yet, if you are unemployed, don't feel like the odd man out, because the U.S. Labor Department notes that claims for state unemployment benefits rose to a six-month high in August. And long-term unemployment remains high: In August, about a third of the 7.1 million official unemployed had been out of work longer than 15 weeks, while about 18% had been out of work longer than 27 weeks.

Industries taking a hit on hiring plans are finance, insurance and real-estate, where 18% of firms plan to hire in the fourth quarter, down from 23% in the third quarter; and education, which dipped to 13% from 17% in the third quarter.

As tracked by the Manpower survey, employers in the West and the South showed the greatest hiring optimism for the fourth quarter among four regions nationwide. In the Northeast, 18% of employers plan to hire, down from 20% in the third quarter, while in the Midwest 17% said they'll hire in the upcoming quarter, about flat with 18%.

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