Seasonal Jobs in Florida
According to a recent Ipos poll conducted for Snagajob.com, employers are planning to offer fewer seasonal jobs in Florida and elsewhere in the nation this holiday.
Edward Peachy, who is the executive director of WorkNet Pinellas in Florida, agrees.
“The unemployment rate is up much higher than it was last year at this time, and with retail sales being down considerably from where they have been, it will probably hold true that there will be fewer seasonal employees hired this year than in past years,” said Peachy.
During the last year, 115,500 jobs in Florida have been cut as employers try to maintain their profit margins and deal with a struggling economy, as show by September’s data from the Bureau of Labor Statistic. This means that the state is ranked second in the nation for increased job losses since September of 2007. Unemployment rose 2.4 percentage points last month to 6.6 percent.
SnagAJobs’s poll asked 1,000 hiring mangers throughout the nation about the seasonal jobs they will be offering, said the website’s senior vice president of marketing Cathy McCarthy.
“The picture is somewhat bleak,” said McCarthy. “It looks like hiring will be about 20 percent down overall for those individuals who are hiring. And then there is a fairly significant number of hiring managers who are not planning on hiring this year.”
According to her, hiring mangers said that they hired between five and six seasonal workers during the holidays last year. This year the average participant reported that they only intend to hire 3.7 workers.
Despite a large loss in jobs in Florida over the last year, seasonal employment in the area may not suffer as badly as it will throughout most of the nation. McCarthy said that southern states are hiring more workers for the holidays, with the average employer reporting that they intended to hire 4.5 workers for the shopping season. Still, six out of 10 participants, or 57 percent, said that they did not plan on hiring any new temporary workers.
“They were asked what their reasons were for that, and the highest reason was that 50 percent of those individuals had the expectation that their current staff would take on the additional hours or roles to cover the work,” McCarthy said. “And then 29 percent said, ‘Hey, I don’t have the budget to hire seasonal workers this year.’ And then 21 percent said business is going to be slower this year, so hiring additional employees really wasn’t necessary. And I think all three of those reasons connect to the economy.”
Those who hope to find seasonal jobs in Florida should start looking now. Because there will be less new temporary employment opportunities and more competition for existing jobs, it may take longer to find work. By starting to look early, a job seeker has a greater chance of finding work.
Begin by looking into larger retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Target, because they have higher budgets. Since these employers are even more popular with money conscious consumers, they will likely need more holiday staff than smaller businesses.
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