Job Outlook

The job outlook for 2010 graduates is "not very promising," CNNMoney dryly reports, while noting that job prospects for B.A. holders will drop 1% next year after plummeting 40% this year.

Overall, job prospects for graduates will drop two percent. MBA holders' prospects will rise 11 percent and Ph.D's will see a 20 percent increase in demand.

If you are unlucky enough to find yourself on the market as a grad with little to no experience, consider this: Employers with fewer than 500 people on staff said they expect hiring at their companies to jump by 15 percent; each company surveyed by Michigan State University will hire an average of 11 grads, 8 of which will be B.A.s. A third of employers said they'd consider graduates regardless of their major.

The study didn't touch specifically on j-school grads' outlook, but we know that's basically in the toilet.

The states of California, Texas, and Michigan all added some jobs in October, though year-over-year employment continued to fall.

Michigan decreased its unemployment rate by 1 percent in October, while Wyoming's unemployment rate rose by .9 percent.

California added 25,000 jobs in October, but has lost 687,000 jobs over the year, so you can figure that 25k means very little. In fact, California's 12.5 percent unemployment rate is a series high for the state.

(Related: Indiana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah Add A Couple Thousand Jobs Each)

How's this for an argument: 40 to 60 percent of external hires are unsuccessful, while only 25 percent of internal hires are, according to a story in HRE Online.

So why hire from the outside at all? Why are talented people already inside the company often looked over? The "new kid in school" phenomenon (their words, not ours) contributes to a mystique that makes the external guy look better.

"A common argument for not hiring from within is that 'we don't have anybody with those skills,'" but, experts told HRE Online, "coaching and training existing staff can be a more cost-effective alternative."

"I always like to ask a potential client: 'Are there any internal candidates we can consider and, if not, why not?' " Kurt Weyerhauser, managing partner of Kensington Stone, an executive search firm based in Los Angeles, told HRE Online. He said that a ratio of 35 percent external to 65 percent internal is about the right balance.

It seems in our (limited) experience that many media companies like to promote their employees from within up to a certain point, but if you want to advance higher, you'll have to go outside the company (and then possibly return later). Does this jibe with your experience? Let us know.

Three months ago we looked at job trend graphs for popular media jobs, thanks to Indeed.com's engine which counts the number of postings containing a specific keyword. It's totally not scientifically accurate, especially without context of any kind, but it's a good glimpse into what the market looks like.

Trend for "journalist" in August 2009:

Trend for "journalist" now:

"Blogger" then:

"Blogger" now:

More after the jump!

continued...

flickr: ArtemFinland

The economy only lost 190,000 jobs in October, a much smaller loss than the six hundred thousand or so the U.S. was shedding each month back in early 2009; the BLS revised down the job-loss figures for August and September (so they were less awful than we thought), and first-time unemployment claims are falling.

Too, productivity rose by 9.5 percent in the third quarter: that means that more companies are doing more work with the same number of people. "But just as hamsters can run only so fast on their treadmills, there are limits to productivity growth....Should the economy expand in the fourth quarter at the same 3.5 percent annual rate it did in the third quarter—as it shows every sign of doing—companies won't have any choice but to hire."

Tell us something we don't know: In September, the job openings rate was 1.9 percent, little changed from August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today in its Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).

This amounts to 2.5 million open positions, or about 57,000 more than August, which is, of course, nothing significant.

Education & health, hospitality, manufacturing, and professional and business services all showed month-over-month growth but no sector's openings grew year over year. The hires and quits rate—measures of how willing employers are to take on new employees, and of how able employees feel they are able to change jobs— were both little changed and remained low. Translation: It's not pretty out there.

Related: The Only Change In Job Openings In August: Color
U.S. Gov't 1984'ing Our Job Stats?

On Friday the news came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that unemployment reached double-digits, something the Obama administration had desperately tried to forestall.
We collected some reactions from bloggers and reporters on what this means:

Felix Salmon, blogger for Reuters: "This is truly awful....When you're unemployed, you don't spend. So long as unemployment remains high consumer demand will be depressed. That's going to be true even if the savings rate starts dropping, thanks largely to the enormous debt burden that US consumers have already placed upon themselves."

Megan McArdle, business blogger for The Atlantic: "This figure is likely to get worse before it gets better. Corporations tend to want some evidence of sustainable recovery before they start hiring workers who will have expensive startup costs and will be traumatic to fire if there's another downturn."

Joseph Brusuelas, Moody's Economy.com: "The latest data do not support arguments that the labor market will stabilize early in 2010." (Source)

David Leonhardt, NYT: "All in all, today's jobs report was a little disappointing, though not hugely so. The job market is still in terrible shape, but it seems still to be improving slowly."

Tucker Carlson's "The Daily Caller," the soon-to-launch right-leaning Huffington Post-style news site, is looking for a few good men and women, Politico reports.

He's hired at least one editor, Moira Bagley, formerly of the RNC, Roll Call, and New Majority, and he's posted an ad for an executive editor. Politico's Michael Calderone also reports that the site will be hiring some reporters and bloggers, one who will cover the White House.

We found a job ad for freelancers that Carlson apparently posted on journalismjobs.com last week, and then deleted. Here's the cached version, and here's the full text:

"Freelance writers wanted to cover politics and government for The Daily Caller, a new web-based news organization edited by Tucker Carlson. Writers will be paid on a profit share model. Please contact submissions@dailycaller.com."

If this ad is still accurate (and since it was taken down, we don't know yet), we have one question. Profit share, eh? With $3 million of V.C. money to throw around? Well, unlike HuffPo, at least he's planning to pay his writers.

The unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent in October, finally cracking that 10 percent ceiling that politicians never thought we'd hit, and I for one am not happy about it.

Sure, with unemployment hovering at 9 point whatever percent for the last few months, squeaking past 10 isn't objectively a huge decline, but psychologically it's enormous.

There are now 15.7 million people without jobs in this country, and that only counts the ones who are still looking. Gave up on your search? Went back to school? Took a crappy low-paying job? That's another 11.7 million of you.

How about those bottoming out jobless claims?

flickr: guido.r

Out of 201 large employers surveyed by Watson Wyatt, 54 percent of employers that froze salaries are planning to thaw them by April; 49 percent of companies that instituted a hiring freeze will at least partially reverse it.

Only 5 percent of companies believed they would never reverse the pay freeze.

These companies are hiring; almost all of them (96 percent) have extended offers to new employees in the past three months, and 93 percent anticipate hiring more in the coming three months.