Unemployment looms as a major threat to many families if not society as a whole, and next week I’ll be speaking at a local convocation on the topic along with professors from two of the highly regard yet hopelessly liberal colleges here in Minnesota. The usual line from liberal economists: economic catastrophe, government rescue needed!!! Me: nonsense, opportunities everywhere.
Three signs:
The Temp Business is Booming
Look at trends since 1971 and two leading indicators stand out: stock market and temp staffing. Stocks go up, jobs come back. Need to hire coming out of a recession? Go for temp hires until you get some visibility.
So what do we see going on? The markets are up and the temp business is booming. The market has recouped its massive losses from earlier this year, and the temp industry, well the numbers I see from Tempworks clients say things haven’t been stronger in a long time.
2004/2005 was the last time I’ve seen anything like what the growth we’ve had in the last three months. The demand from staffing companies for seasoned recruiters, software tools, and payroll funding evident at the recent Staffing World Conference bore resemblance to the 1997 boom period.
Danger and delight however grow on one stalk, and the person or company that isn’t ready for a change, even a change for the positive like we’re seeing now, risks getting left behind.
The Fail Conference
Enjoying failure means good times ahead. Tomorrow I’m heading to the Fail Conference in San Francisco, a get together of startup founders, VCs, coders and who knows who else where we’ll seek solace in a mutual self-confession of past business failure.
Your business failed, you’re unemployed, Google disintermediated your startup, your bank cancelled your loan, your star developer quit. Yeah, that all hurts, but guess what?
The skater falls, Don’t empty the water jar until the rain falls. The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it hath. Get back up cuz good times are at hand.
There’s Always North Dakota
- Houses in the Bismarck/Mandan area priced at the $200,000 level (which is a typical 5-10 year old 3-4 bedroom house here) have all been bought up due to low interest rates, a great job market, and the flooding moving people around.
- Starting salary at a fast food restaurant in Bismarck/Mandan is $10/hour and they can’t even keep their stores fully staffed.
- There is Olympic housing setup in north/west ND due to having nowhere for the workers to stay while working on the oil rigs.
- The front page of the paper every day is about slowing the growth down in north/west ND
- Monday’s Bismarck Tribune talked of the number of people living in temporary housing, the toll it is taking on the roads and the infrastructure in the counties – the water supply is struggling to keep up as well as the city sewers
- There have been 38 new hotels built in the western half of ND in the last year.
- ND added 20,000 jobs last year
- Unemployment is at an all time low for ND at 3.5%
- The state budget has an estimated $1 billion surplus
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I keep reading all about how our economy is in dire need of government rescue and how our government is in need of rescue too. I don’t know, but all of that kind of talk has just shifted the opportunities into staffing companies. There are a lot of temp to perm opportunities going out from our office and we’ve seen businesses really using the positive advantages offered by working with a staffing company. Many businesses that were skeptical before the recession, now even when in good financial standing, prefer to use staffing services to screen and try out employees. This recession and double recession scare has seemingly made many just smarter in their business strategy. There are no jobs? I don’t believe that, not for one second! Nonsense indeed!
Like or Dislike:
0 
0