Yahoo! Finance (01/24/12)

Express Employment Professionals reports that 2011 sales increased by 22% to top $2.1 billion, as businesses continue to rely heavily on temporary staffing solutions amid an uncertain economy. Express helped the most people in its 29-year history—more than 335,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada—find a job in 2011. Express associates worked an average of 2.4 million hours per week at more than 550 franchise locations in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa.

In the two years after the Great Recession ended in June 2009, U.S. staffing firms created more new jobs than any other industry, according to the American Staffing Association.

Yahoo! Finance (01/24/12)

Gregory Netland, North American chief executive officer and executive board member of Randstad, talked about the firm’s strategies in an interview with The Wall Street Transcript. Randstad “is very focused on continuous market share gains. We want to be in the top three in every major market around the world,” according to Netland. He says the company has “a focus on shaping the world of work, and that focus is on providing added value to our candidates, added value to our clients, and being a leader in the industry, both from a what-we-do perspective and how-we-do-it perspective.” Netland notes Randstad has become the No. 2 human resource services organization in the world, and says that “the U.S. [market] will, on a go-forward basis, be around 20% of revenue.”

MarketWatch (01/24/12)

Information technology staffing solutions firm TEKsystems reports its quarterly IT Professional Perspectives Survey found IT professionals primarily value clear and realistic views of a job opportunity and feedback throughout the hiring process. “As IT professionals go through their own process of job searching, organizations should go through a similar self-evaluation to determine what skills, knowledge, and abilities enable people to excel within their organization,” says TEKsystems director, Rachel Russell. “Job boards present challenges to employers due to the abundance of résumés and the tendency for skill exaggeration on résumés. The unrivaled leader in terms of effective job search tactics is networking. Credible referrals from people you trust are the best avenue to a new job that’s a truly good fit.”

When asked who they consult with most frequently during the job search process, 59% of IT professionals report the No. 1 resource they confer with is a recruiter. “IT professionals want to talk with someone who can shed real light on an opportunity rather than just sharing what’s written on the job description. Many IT hiring managers are just too busy to make all these calls and share all this information themselves; and a job board, of course, cannot speak to potential candidates. That’s where great recruiters come in,” states Russell.

Wall Street Journal Online (01/24/12) Josh Mitchell

New government data indicate the jobless rate fell in 37 states and Washington, DC, in December as the labor market strengthened. The Jan. 24 report shows the gains are spread across the nation, and that most of the gains are due to employers adding jobs rather than workers falling out of the labor force. The number of people with jobs rose in 25 states and Washington, DC. Jobs declined in 24 states and were unchanged in one state. Texas enjoyed the largest increase in nonfarm payrolls with 20,200 added jobs, followed by Indiana (15,000 new jobs) and California (10,700). New York, Missouri, and Washington state saw the biggest declines in jobs.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution (01/25/12)

The declining unemployment rate and increased reports of companies that are hiring paints the picture of an economy that is making progress, though it appears to be unsteady and uneven, with hiring up in some sectors and down in others. In Georgia—the only one of the nation’s dozen largest states that has not added jobs in the past 12 months—nearly 460,000 residents are unemployed and looking for work, and more than half of them have been out of work six months or longer.

However, the white-collar world has started to perk up, say some staffing companies. Tennille Hall, vice president of Accounting Principals Inc. in Atlanta, says she has seen increased demand for accountants and information technology specialists. “If you have a ‘demand skill-set,’ if you are dedicated and want to work, there’s a place for you,” she says. Hiring for marketing professionals has also been picking up, according to Jodi Gill, president of the Experts Bench in Duluth, GA. “We are starting to see money moving in the marketplace. Our business has almost doubled from a year ago,” she says. “We’ve especially had a lot of demand for consultants in the last 90 days.”