Mr$. Bonddad is the HR director and an architectural firm in Houston.
1.) Last Friday she went to a recruiter event at an architectural school. Last year there were 26 firms; this year there were 6. And none of them were hiring.
2.) Her firm recently placed an advertisement from an administrative assistance. Last year she would have received between 50 and 100 resumes. This year she received 700.
This is one person's experience in a large city. But......
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10 comments:
just call her your wife. this mr$ started with barry - went over to tim and now you are doing it. at least get original.
no shit the job market is bad - like we needed to hear that from you.
Sounds like Anonymous just got laid off. Or lost a lot of money in the stock market. Hopefully both! =P
Any real world details Bonddad wants to provide is ok with me. (And, after all, it is HIS blog.) I'm on the west coast and I like hearing info about other parts of the country.
We had a job opening for meter reader here in the northwest. 600 people showed up to apply for one position!
On a bright note I'm seeing companies looking for project managers for when the rebuilding starts.
I was in Houston over the Christmas holidays and all of the big restaurants appeared to be packed. Likewise my travels to Austin and Fort Worth yielded no visible signs of recession. Since architecture is so tied to building and that is in the crapper maybe your observation is skewed. I know that my wife continues to do her part in keeping the economy going. If there is one thing that she cannot stand it's the thought of unspent money languishing in the checking account. I'm sure that somewhere in China there is an image of her that is worshipped as a deity.
How are that administrative assistant's road and school construction skills?
Did they teach her how to weild a jackhammer in her Word Processing class?
Thanks, from my trading isolation, it is good to flesh out the statistics, as horrifying as they are, because the consequences of this 'mess' are big, growing, and going to affect all of us.
Your blog is great, call your wife what you like, Mr. Newly-Wed.
Not all us anonymous are as much of a jackass as That Guy^^
I'm gonna leave you even more depressed. Houston hasn't even begun to see this recession really bite. By later this year, when the last of the oil boomlet of 2008 has sublimated, Houston and the rest of the awlpatch will begin to feel the real pain that the rest of the country has been feeling for the last 18 months. I saw this happen back during the early 1980s, when Houston, Dallas, Midland and the rest were rocking, until the high energy costs blew the bottom out of the national economy. The cliff-diving was spectacular, with the rig count collapsing from about 4500 to under 1000 in short order and devastating the oil service businesses.
My wife works in HR at the Atlanta headquarters of a nationwide retailer. They've seen at least a fivefold increase in the number of applicants for each open position they advertise, although they've cut back on those announcements (both for cost savings and because they have such a big pool of candidate resumes now).
She was an IT recruiter during the dot-com era, and she says the job market is a lot like it was during the dot-come crash (glut of available workers, overqualified people applying for jobs), except that the applicants are coming from *every* kind of background you can imagine -- not just IT.
Here in Atlanta, at least, it is much as Bonddad describes. I wouldn't be surprised if all metro areas in the country are seeing similar conditions.
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