Job Seekers Search Longer in Q1

April 10, 2002 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - There were more job seekers - and they were looking longer - in the first quarter, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

First-quarter job search times were 50% longer than a year ago, according to the firm. 

Productivity gains encouraged employers to delay hiring, while an increase in the number of job seekers boosted the average search to 3.41 months from 2.27 months in the first quarter of 2001.

Never miss a story — sign up for PLANSPONSOR newsletters to keep up on the latest retirement plan benefits news.

Not As Sure?
 
“Several factors are slowing hiring.  For one, not all employers seem as confident about a recovery as economists and some Wall Street analysts appear to be,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.  “Employers who cut jobs and hours as we entered the recession are likely to just add hours as we come out of the recession, which is supported by the fact that manufacturers reported an increase in overtime hours in March.”

Older workers were faced with an even longer search, according to the Challenger Job Market Index.  Job seekers over 50 took 3.93 months to find a job, a 74% increase from the 2.26 months of a year ago.

Challenger cites data from the the Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows that 16.3% of the 8.1 million unemployed have been actively looking for work for 27 weeks or longer. 

The Challenger Job Market Index is based on a quarterly survey of 3,000 discharged managers and executives from a wide variety of industries throughout the United States.

 

Knowing Workers' Change Styles

April 9, 2002 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - When it comes to thriving in a marketplace that seems to recreate itself all the time, top executives can rest assured that most managers welcome workplace change.

That was one result of a survey by Discovery Learning, a training products developer, of manager behaviors in the workplace.

Discovery Learning classified respondents along a three-part continuum:

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANSPONSOR NEWSDash daily newsletter.

  • originators who welcome dramatic change
  • conservers who are comfortable with gradual change
  • pragmatists who most heavily support changes that solve current problems


More than half of the managers surveyed scored in the pragmatist range, 26% were in the originator range and 22% were classified as conservers.
 
Results also show that:

  • men are much more likely than women to be originators, by a 5% margin,
  • women are much more likely to be conservers than men, 27% compared to 17%,
  • the communications industry had the heaviest percentage of pragmatists at 71% and the fewest conservers at 11%,
  • the petroleum industry shows the fewest number of originators, and
  • the real change agents, or originators, among the professions were soldiers at 46%, school principals at 42%, and business consultants at 40%.


Furthermore, Baby Boomers were the age group that had the most change agents, with 33% of originators while Gen Xers had 26% originators. A little over a quarter of those born during the depression and after World War II were originators

Generally, researchers said, managers would do well to understand the different ways people react to change. For example, they said, a worker who fights change may actually be strongly devoted to the company.

The survey covered more than 5,000 mid-to-upper level managers nationally, contacted between 1996 and 2001.


 

«