SHRM: Labor Market Continues to Send Mixed Signals

Editor's Note: The following ran in a recent newsletter of the Society of Human Resource Management. Members can click here to read the entire article.

HR professionals are gaining confidence in the U.S. job market. They hope to start hiring again. They just don’t know when.

One-third of HR professionals surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) have some level of concern about the U.S. job market for the fourth quarter of 2009, with 35 percent saying that they are somewhat optimistic and 4 percent declaring themselves very optimistic about job growth in the nation for the last three months of the year. That’s a big change from the first quarter of 2009, when 73 percent of survey respondents expressed some level of pessimism.

But when it comes to forecasting staffing increases for their organizations, only 20 percent expect such an expansion in the fourth quarter of 2009. Many HR professionals are hesitant to predict when they might increase hiring. The statistics are revealed in the SHRM Labor Market Outlook survey report for October-December 2009, released Oct. 22.

Among highlights of the report:

• Fifty-nine percent of companies will maintain their staffing levels in the fourth quarter of 2009, with 14 percent planning to cut jobs.
• Thirty percent of companies conducted layoffs in the third quarter, even though only 13 percent of organizations had predicted layoffs when surveyed by SHRM before the third quarter.
• The government sector eliminated jobs at the highest rate—41 percent—of any sector in the third quarter, despite federal stimulus funds beginning to flow to state governments for job creation. Many state governments have been forced to make deep staffing cuts to balance their budgets in the face of rapidly plunging revenues.
• Nonprofit organizations added employees at the highest rate in the third quarter of 2009, with 24 percent conducting hiring.