Unemployment rate down to 12.4 percent after many leave area
Brian J. O'Connor / Detroit News Finance Editor
John King is in a very small, very exclusive and very encouraging Michigan club: People who landed a job in November.
King, 36, started as technical delivery manager at the Troy office of Ally Financial on Nov. 1, overseeing information technology projects. That was after 13 months in a lower-level, lower-paying job and three months with no paycheck at all, after losing a similar job in a mass layoff in June 2009.
"At the time I got laid off, five managers at my level were laid off at the same time," said the Lake Orion father of two.
Only 1,999 other Michiganians joined King in the new-job club in November, according to state data released Wednesday that contains both good news and bad news.
The good news is that the state jobless rate fell by four-tenths of a percentage point, down to 12.4 percent. That means 22,000 workers aren't pounding the pavement for a new job.
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The bad news is that 20,000 workers either retired, left the state, died or just quit looking for work.
Despite the huge job losses that have hit the state, John King and other professionals in accounting, technology and finance are seeing encouraging signs on the hiring line.
"In the last six to eight months, I was getting more phone calls from recruiters," King said. "Things were definitely opening up."
Matt Lewry, executive vice president for Accretive Solutions of Troy, a national recruiting firm that placed King, sees opportunities for experienced professionals opening up.
"The silver lining is that if you are a professional in Michigan, demand is picking up," Lewry said.
The reason is that some people have retired or left the state, shrinking the pool of job-hunters, he said.
As the automakers and others have recovered from the near-collapse of the industry, the demand for experienced professionals is beginning to change the balance of power between candidates who'd take anything a year ago and employers who suddenly are discovering that a good CPA is hard to find.
"All last year we would have 10 candidates for a position, and 90 percent of those were really good people who were displaced," Lewry said. "Today, that candidate pool might be down to five."
Part of the demand is being driven by technology upgrades at companies that have put off spending on infrastructure improvements since the downturn started, he added.
"There's a lot of investment in information technology now, which drives a lot of investment in people and processes and organization changes."
Laura Barron started her new job as chief financial officer of Financial One Inc. in Plymouth on Monday, after a year of finding nothing but consulting and contract work. Her last employer moved out of state in July 2008, and Barron decided to take some time off until the youngest of her three sons started kindergarten.
"I started looking in late summer of 2009, and that was when the job market just completely crashed," the 40-year-old Novi resident said. "I was using five recruiters, and there really wasn't anything until this fall."
When job offers did start picking up, Barron said, she noticed salaries were coming back to pre-recession levels, too.
"When I was looking in the fall of 2009, there weren't many positions available, but the ones I did get called on where a lot lower paying," she said. "If there was a job out there, it was scooped up by people who had a lot more experience than the position required, and it was at a lower salary.
Even professionals who managed to hang on to their jobs are being tempted to make a move, Lewry said.
"Throughout the last two years if people stayed in their jobs they either got zero increases or took a decrease in salary," he said. "Now we're seeing people move for increases."
While the improved job outlook for some experienced professionals is encouraging, entry level jobs aren't opening up, and some sectors, such as construction and government jobs, are still experiencing large losses. The shrinking unemployment rate has mostly come about because 46,000 fewer people are in the work force looking for jobs than there were in November 2009.
Despite an impressive drop in unemployment by two full percentage points — from 14.4 percent to 12.4 percent — in the past 12 months, the number of people in the state getting paychecks has fallen by 19,000 workers.
And while the news from the financial services and information sectors is encouraging compared to November of last year, those categories still have a combined loss of 9,000 jobs.
Even the recruiter Lewry doesn't overstate the good news.
"The balance for some employment seekers is starting to come back to something like normal," he said. "But that's not hard to do when you had almost nothing the year before."
