New Jersey's Online Job Demand Rises 6,000 in May, The Conference Board Reports

Press Release / News

June 2, 2009

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New Jersey's Online Job Demand Rises 6,000 in May, The Conference Board Reports

Download a PDF of the press release and the technical notes .

New Jersey labor demand continues to show improvement, increasing 14,000 since January.
New Jersey is among a handful of States now showing positive trend improvements in labor demand.
All New Jersey metro areas show modest improvement.
Challenge: reducing the gap between the supply (unemployed) and demand (advertised vacancies).

New Jersey's online advertised job vacancies rose by 6,000 in May to 120,700, and since January 2009 has risen by 14,000, or 13 percent, according to The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series (HWOL)™. At the national level, job demand continued to drop through April, but in May was up by 250,000, marking the first increase in six months and the largest monthly increase in two years.

"New Jersey is showing improvements, and this is a welcome sign," said June Shelp, Vice President at The Conference Board. Labor demand typically leads the trends in both employment and unemployment, so positive signals on labor demand are always important. Over the last four months, New Jersey has performed better than any other state in the Northeast and is among only a handful of states that are showing modest trend increases in online demand. Of New Jersey's current 120,700 advertised vacancies, 74,000 are new listings posted within the last 30 days. Online advertised vacancies peaked in New Jersey at 172,600 in March 2008 and fell sharply in December 2008 and January 2009 but have risen since then (Chart 1 on pdf).

The gap between the number of New Jersey unemployed and the number of advertised vacancies has widened dramatically over the past two years and now stands at 260,000 (Chart 1 on pdf). This has resulted in a Supply/Demand rate of 3.34 for New Jersey, indicating that there are over 3 unemployed individuals for every advertised vacancy and making the job search process much more challenging for the unemployed. "Even with New Jersey's 14,000 increase in labor demand over the past four months, in order to reduce the S/D rate, it will be important to be able to quickly align the unemployed with these new job opportunities," Shelp noted. (Table B on pdf)

State/MSA Highlights

The impact of the current economic downturn has had varying impacts across New Jersey's metropolitan areas, although all of the areas have shown improvement in the last few months. Two of the metro areas that cross state boundaries, New York — Northeastern New Jersey and Camden, along with the Trenton and Vineland metro areas, began to drop by mid-2008, followed by sharp downturns in December 2008 and January 2009 with the financial market turmoil. The Allentown metro area, which includes Warren, NJ, did not begin to turn down until October 2008. Atlantic City experienced an almost steady decline beginning in May 2007 while Ocean City saw little impact from the New Jersey downturn until the end of 2008 and has risen steadily since then.

New Jersey's MSAs also show a great degree of variation in their supply/demand rates, which provide an indication of the degree of difficulty an unemployed individual will experience in finding employment opportunities (Table A on pdf). Trenton is the metro area in the best shape with low S/D rates around 2.1, indicating there are about 2 unemployed individuals for each job ad. In contrast, there were over 7 unemployed looking for work in Atlantic City for every advertised vacancy. Supply/Demand rates for other areas were Allentown (6.0), Ocean City (5.1), Vineland (5.1), New York — Northeastern New Jersey (4.4) and Camden (4.3).

Occupational Highlights

Occupations with increases in the last few months include positions in healthcare such as occupational therapists, and office positions including customer service representative and executive secretaries and assistants as well as tellers.

In New Jersey, the most widely advertised occupations are Computer and Mathematical positions (18,700) followed by Management positions (15,800) and Sales and Related positions (13,200). These occupations account for 16 percent, 13 percent, and 11 percent of the online classified ads respectively. In these broad categories, specific occupations with an increase in advertised vacancies in recent months include web designers, marketing managers and front-line managers of sales.

Highlights of the National Picture

Nationally, online advertised vacancies were 3,367,300 in May — an increase of 250,000 over the month. The May gain was the first since the modest gain of 21,000 in October 2008 and the largest since October 2006. Even with this month's increase, online advertised vacancies remained down 1,152,000, or 25 percent, since last year.

The full national release with geographic detail for the nation, the 9 Census regions, 50 States and 52 large metropolitan areas as well as occupational detail is available on The Conference Board website here at www.conference-board.org/economics/helpwantedOnline.cfm.

PROGRAM NOTES

The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series™ measures the number of new, first-time online jobs and jobs reposted from the previous month on more than 1,200 major Internet job boards and smaller job boards that serve niche markets and smaller geographic areas.

Like The Conference Board's long-running Help-Wanted Advertising Index of print ads (which was published for over 55 years and discontinued in July 2008 and continues to be available for research), the new online series is not a direct measure of job vacancies. The level of ads in both print and online may change for reasons not related to overall job demand.

With the October 1, 2008 release, HWOL began providing seasonally adjusted data for the U.S., the 9 Census regions and 50 States. Seasonally adjusted data for occupations is provided beginning with the June 1, 2009 release. This data series, for which the earliest data is May 2005, continues to publish not seasonally adjusted data for the 52 large metropolitan areas, but it is The Conference Board's intent to provide seasonally adjusted data for large metro areas in the future.

People using this data are urged to review the information on the database and methodology available on The Conference Board website and contact the economists listed at the top of this release with questions and comments. Background information and technical notes on this new series are available here at: www.conference-board.org/economics/helpwantedOnline.cfm.

The underlying data for this series is provided by Wanted Technologies Corporation. Additional information on the Bureau of Labor Statistics data used in this release can be found on the BLS website, www.bls.gov.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE BOARD

The Conference Board is a global, independent business-membership and research association working in the public interest. Our mission is unique: To provide the world's leading organizations with the practical knowledge they need to improve their performance AND better serve society. The Conference Board is a non-advocacy, not-for-profit entity holding 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status in the United States. www.conference-board.org.

WANTED Technologies Corporation

WANTED is a leading supplier of real-time sales and business intelligence solutions for the media classified and recruitment industries. Using its proprietary On-Demand data mining, lead generation and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integrated technologies, WANTED aggregates real-time data from thousands of online job boards, real estate and newspaper sites, as well as corporate Web sites on a daily basis.

WANTED's data is used to optimize sales and to implement marketing strategies within the classified ad departments of major media organizations, as well as by staffing firms, advertising agencies and human resources specialists. For more information, please visit: www.wantedtech.com.

THE CONFERENCE BOARD U.S. HELP-WANTED ONLINE™ DATA SERIES
Release Dates for 2009

June 2009 data — Monday, June 29
July 2009 data — Monday, August 3
August 2009 data — Monday, August 31
September 2009 data — Monday, September 28
October 2009 data — Monday, November 2
November 2009 data — Wednesday, December 2*
December 2009 data — Wednesday, January 6*

*Wednesday release due to holidays or data availability.

For further information contact:
Frank Tortorici
(1) 212 339 0231
f.tortorici@conference-board.org

Gad Levanon
1 212 339 0317
gad.levanon@conference-board.org

June Shelp
1 212 339 0369
june.shelp@conference-board.org