Lack of workers limiting hiring

A sluggish housing sector and a lack of workers could hamper local hiring in the third quarter, according to a new report from an employment agency.

Most local companies — 76 percent — plan to maintain current staffing levels in the third quarter, while 17 percent will add workers and 7 percent will pare employees, the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey said.

The hiring forecast isn’t as rosy as the outlook a year ago, when 30 percent of companies said they’d bolster rosters between July and September.

Expectations for net job growth, which is the difference between staff additions and layoffs, fell from 20 percent a year ago to 10 percent today.

Tom Haynie, Manpower’s chief financial officer, attributed the hiring scale-back to two factors: A torpid housing market and a lack of employable workers.

"Low unemployment has created a situation where there aren’t a lot of skilled job seekers out there," Haynie said. "The cream of the crop has been skimmed off. A lot of the folks coming in (to Manpower) now are either new to Las Vegas or they don’t have a lot of marketable job skills."

Among the businesses feeling the pinch of slackened hiring is Manpower itself.

Job orders for temporary help are down about 15 percent at the employment agency when compared with a year ago, Haynie estimated.

Especially tough to find are qualified executive assistants, welders and health-care workers.

Employees in the light-industrial and warehousing sector remain easier to come by, Haynie said. The call-center industry also has available workers.

The Manpower survey comes on the heels of a report Monday that showed unemployment in Nevada has crept past the national jobless rate for the first time in five years. Unemployment in the Silver State was 4.6 percent in May, compared with 4.5 percent nationwide.

But Brian Gordon, a principal of research firm Applied Analysis, noted that joblessness in Las Vegas is 4.2 percent. Plus, any softening in the hiring market is most likely part of the ebb and flow of the city’s business cycle, he said. Surging job formation in Southern Nevada is generally tied to the launch of big resorts, and the city is between openings: The last big hotel-casino to open was the $925 million Red Rock Resort in April 2006, and the next to open will be the Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s $1.8 billion Palazzo in late 2007.

"We’re in a trough between major property openings," Gordon said. "Key projects that open in the future will spur additional demand in the job market."

Haynie agreed.

"We just came through a boom period," he said. "Booms can’t last forever. We’ll see the market decline slightly and things will slip. We’re not at the point where things are bad and we need to ask, ‘Gosh, what are we going to do?’ "

Local business executives also said they believe that the economic slowdown reflected in the Manpower report is temporary.

Bob Linden, president of Shred-it Las Vegas, said business is slightly off in the housing sector, with home builders and mortgage companies in particular scheduling fewer calls for the document-destruction company’s services.

But Linden looks at the $30 billion-plus in resort developments scheduled to come online in Las Vegas through 2010 and has high hopes for the future. Shred-it will be among the 17 percent of local businesses bringing on new workers in the third quarter, as Linden prepares to hire a salesperson to supplement his existing work force of 16.

"We still have a robust economy," said Linden, who pegged Shred-it’s growth pace between fair and strong. "Las Vegas will continue to grow, and with that growth comes additional business."

Also among the local companies planning to grow is BlueTree Management Services. The mystery-shopping business merged with Global Intelligence Network in October and gained some national accounts. Now, Blue Tree President Frank Petrasich wants to bring on one to two salespeople and a dozen undercover agents within the next two months.

"The need for our services is still very strong," Petrasich said. "We haven’t seen any decline in requests for our services. In fact, we see more and more businesses that recognize the need for mystery shopping to help them sustain their good customer service."