Feeble U.S. Hiring Demand Fails to Show Normal Post-Holiday Bounce

Volume of Job Ads in January Indicates Continuing Deterioration in Employment Outlook

WANTED Technologies, the leading source of insight and analysis based on hiring demand, announced today that its Hiring Demand Indicators did not rebound in January to normal levels following the usual holiday slowdown. WANTEDís Hiring Demand Indicators have tracked online job ad volume on a weekly basis for the past six years, and this yearís post-holiday recovery in the level of hiring demand is the lowest seen since the data series began.

ìEvery year for the past six years, hiring demand in the first and second week of January either exceeded or was equal to levels seen prior to the seasonal hiring slowdown during the Thanksgiving and the December holidays,î said Bruce Murray, President and CEO of WANTED (www.wantedtech.com). WANTEDís January Hiring Demand data confirms other measures of economic activity. If employers were more confident about the state of the economy, they would be advertising for new workers at much higher levels.î

WANTED analyzes more than six million job listings per weekógiving it an extraordinary amount of information about what isóand is notóhappening in the employment market. In addition to publishing Hiring Demand data and analysis through its web-based WANTED Analytics platform, WANTED also supplies its data to The Conference Board. On a monthly basis The Conference Board uses the nationwide job ad volume figures to produce its monthly Help-Wanted OnLine Data Seriesô.

Over the past five months, WANTED has been measuring the precipitous drop in hiring demand in the wake of the financial crisis. WANTED has incorporated this trend into a model to predict the monthly change in overall U.S. Employment measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the past several months, WANTED has been able to predict the change in U.S. Employment more accurately than consensus estimates, in part, because the WANTED models include precise hiring demand data.

With the passage of the stimulus bill, analysts will be looking for signs that tax cuts and spending programs are working to create new jobs,î said Murray. ìWe believe that some of the earliest signs of the stimulus working will be in the levels of hiring demand that we are tracking.î