I was having a nice little Friday afternoon-until I read this article! http://www.ere.net/2012/04/06/march-jobs-gains-are-smallest-in-months/#more-24799  Ouch!  (thanks @ere.net ha!) Jobs growth has decreased in the month of March.

hat I personally think has contributed to the decrease is the fact that the holiday seasons are over. There was a huge increase in job openings in the retail and hotel/restaurant sectors from October to January. Once we got through the holiday craze, quietly crept through Valentine’s Day, retail and hotel/restaurant sectors stopped adding full and part time employees to their staff. In fact, many people I know that had full time employment jobs in those sectors, we reduced to part-time hours, or even worse, their positions were terminated.

While we knew that the economy was bound to soften eventually, as the same issues affecting our economy from 2009-2011 are still rampant (lowered GDP, termination of government employees, home-owners not being able to re-mortgage or re-finance their upside-down properties, an influx of first-time job seekers entering the workforce without employment secured and a slew of other depressing factors that I’m not even going to get into), I think that economists were a bit overzealous to say that the economy would be significantly picking up in 2012. As a country, we have still not been focusing on the root of the issue, which is creating jobs via any means that we can. While I can’t blame myself personally for this (I still contribute to the retail and restaurant sector and my company has continually been employing new hires since April 2010), I can say that those at fault (cough, cough Congress) need to get it together and start creating solutions for the mess we are in.

Side note-while the economy has been adding fewer jobs, I have seen a rise in the amount of recruitment opportunities available to me and my friends and colleagues. Are the tides changing for active job seekers? I have had more traffic on my LinkedIn account, my HR blog, my HR Twitter and more interviews since January 2012 than I have had since starting my job search in late 2010! I find this shocking considering the current state of our economy.

What are your thoughts on how recruitment and employee retention has been affected since January 2012?

Enjoy the weekend comrades!

Namaste