Kansas City-area employers increase online job advertising in January
Kansas City-area employers are ramping up online advertising of job vacancies, posting 15,000 new ads in January, more than the prior month and significantly more than in January 2009.
The new ads posted in January increased 3.4 percent from the 14,500 new ads posted the prior month and 40 percent from the 10,700 new ads posted at the beginning of 2009, The Conference Board reported Monday.
“You picked up 500 or so ads between December and January, which is not a month where you typically see increases,” said June Shelp, who worked on the report and is a vice president with The Conference Board. “To me, that’s a pretty positive sign.”
Total online advertised job vacancies for the metro area rose 7.9 percent compared with 24,100 in December and 28.7 percent compared with 20,200 in January 2009. The numbers are not seasonally adjusted.
Nationwide, job demand rose by 382,000 in January to 4.02 million in January, using seasonally adjusted numbers. The number follows a 255,000 increase in December and a 107,000 increase in November. The Conference Board called those numbers consistent with the gross domestic product results for the fourth quarter.
“The last three months have shown a sharp upturn in employer demand for workers,” Gad Levanon, associate director for macroeconomic research at The Conference Board, said in a release. “These increases have brought us back near the labor demand levels that existed in November 2008 just prior to the huge losses resulting from the financial turmoil in the last quarter of 2008.”
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