JobsStat

Like in many states, jobs in Florida have been increasingly hard to come by for the last year. Still many are taking it as a good sign that the state’s unemployment rate didn’t climb higher in September. For the last two month 6.6 percent of Florida residents have been without work.

This percentage translates to approximately 613,000 employable people who can not find jobs in Florida. This is the highest unemployment rate the state has had in 14 years, according to the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation.

The current Floridian unemployment rate is 2.4 percentage points higher than it was a year ago and .5 percent higher than the national average.

“I’m surprised it stayed steady,” Bruce Nissen told a reporter from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Nissen, who is an economist at Florida International Unviersity, went on to say that residents shouldn’t get overconfident. He expects the unemployment rate to resume rising before this year is finished.

According to University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith, unemployment statistics are a lagging economic indicator.

“We haven’t seen the worse…We can expect many more jobs lost as the U.S. economy slips into recession,” said Snaith.

Over the course of the last 12 months, 115,500 jobs in Florida have been lost, excluding those in the agricultural sector. Out of these positions, 75,200 positions were in the construction industry, which has been hit hard by the slump in the housing market and the rising foreclosure rate.

Other sectors that have lost a large number of jobs in Florida include manufacturing, retail, professional and business services, financial activities and administration and waste services.

The struggling job market has been particularly difficult on individuals with a long history of work who have only been employed in one industry. Since these people only know how to do one type of work, their options are particularly slim when their industry of choice begins to suffer.

When it gets harder to find a new job, competition for existing positions gets stronger. Employers often find themselves swamped with resumes, despite only have a limited number of openings to fill. This is what happened recently in Providence, Rhode Island when one hotel announced 50 something new jobs.

The downtown Providence Hampton Inn & Suites, which is expected to open in December, received approximately 5,000 applications for 50 to 55 new jobs. With unemployment in the state reaching 8.8 percent last month, many drastically need work.

These new jobs will pay anywhere from $9 to $15 an hour. If the state’s economy was better, positions such as the ones with this hotel would not draw as much attention. In order to be able to pay their bills, many will take whatever work they can get, which means that Rhode Island probably has a huge portion of its population that would qualify as underemployed. Out of the 5,000 people who applied, the Hampton Inn & Suites interviewed around 1,200.

According to Michael Buddenmeyer, the regional director of hotel operations for Fall River’s First Bristol Corp., 45 of the new jobs will be full-time positions. The other 5 to 10 will be part-time jobs. All will offer what is considered to be mid-level pay for positions in hotel operations in Rhode Island.

Buddenmeyer said that, given the state of the economy, he had expected to receive a large number of resumes, but had no idea he would be sifting through 5,000 applications. In order to make to be able to even manage such a huge number of applicants, he said that he started by eliminating everyone that did not have previous experience working in a hotel.

Instead of hiring the exact number of people he needed, Buddenmeyer said that he selected a few extra individuals to make up for those that would decide to quit sometime during the several month long training sessions. For example, he hired 16 individuals to work the front desk, even though he only expects to need somewhere around 12. Already, he says, the number of workers training for the front desk positions has dropped to 14.