With the unemployment rate at 8.9% and prospects of it going even lower, certain talent is becoming increasingly scarce. With hiring gains last month in manufacturing (+33,000 jobs), health care (+34,000 jobs) and transportation and warehousing (+22,000 jobs) employers are scrambling to attract talent. Unfortunately, ads on job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder are very costly and only attract quantity not quality! Fortunately, hope resides in adopting SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies for economical recruiting.

I so strongly believe in SEO as a vehicle for recruiting that, over the last six months, I have built up one of the largest SEO groups in the Chicago area with over 500 members. This is because Search engines are the new Yellow Pages and SEO techniques can be selectively adopted by employers to: a) rank higher with search engines and b) stand out among job seekers. For example, developing a blog or contributing to social media sites on specific keywords will be noticed by Google, Yahoo and Bing and in turn discovered by job seekers searching for your type of opportunities. I invite you all as my special guests to our next meeting on Saturday, April 23rd where we will be discussing six free new SEO tools that you can easily adapt to your requirements. Please go to http://www.meetup.com/chicago-seo/ for more details.

Talking Points:

1. 24.7 million= 13.7 mil. Unemployed + 8.3 mil. Involuntarily working part-time + 2.7 mil. Who are not even counted = 24.7 million workers  who are either unemployed or underemployed or 16% of all workers! = 1 in 6 workers still unemployed or underemployed!

2. The recession has killed off 7.9 million jobs. Many of them are not coming back!

3. BLS said that the National Unemployment rate edged down another .1% to 8.9% in February. That makes: .9% over the last three months!

4. Key: after 20 straight (May 2009 to January 2011) months of the unemployment rate being 9.4% or higher it finally dropped below 9.4%!

5. Illinois unemployment rate 9% in January. It has now fallen 12 straight months!

6. Gain of 192,000 non-farm jobs in February.

7. The gains were: a) Manufacturing gained another 33,000 jobs in February (on top of a gain of 49,000 in January= a sign that manufacturing is started to be strong) b) Health Care which rose by 34,000 in February c) Construction added 33,000 jobs in February (versus a loss of 32,000 jobs in January) d) the service sector added 47,000 jobs in February and e) Transportation and warehousing added 22,000 jobs (versus a loss of 38,000 jobs in January).

8. The only real loser was state and local government employment, which edged down and has lost 377,000 jobs since its peak in September, 2008.

9. How bad is it? At February’s pace of 192,000 jobs created, it would take over 5 years or until late this decade to make up for all the jobs lost by the recession.