According to a new survey on employment trends for 2013, employers across the United States will hire more new employees during the second quarter of this year than they did during the first.
Express Employment Professionals, an employment solutions agency, said 38 percent of employers from the United States and Canada responded that they intend to hire for commercial and light industrial staff during the current quarter, which is a 7 percent increase from the first quarter. Administrative and clerical hiring is also expected to be up in the quarter: The survey reports 19 percent of employers plan to hire for these positions, up 3 percent from the previous quarter.
In the press release, Express Employment CEO Bob Funk predicts that all of 2013 will see strong employment growth in general as the “economy continues to edge toward recovery.”
With numbers for employment trends still being reported from the first quarter of 2013, the U.S. Commerce Department reports that the real gross domestic product (GDP), a primary indicator of the overall U.S. economy, had a quarter-to-quarter increase of 2.5 percent in the first quarter. While not the largest quarter-to-quarter increase over the past three years, it is higher than the fourth quarter 2012 growth of 0.4 percent. Additionally, this represents the 15th consecutive quarter of GDP growth.
The U.S. unemployment rate also fell during each month of the first quarter of 2013. February’s numbers were the best since 2008 with the jobless rate at 7.7 percent, and it fell even further in March to 7.6 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The slight fall in the unemployment rate represents a payroll employment increase of 88,000, reports a news release from the BLS. Industries with increased employment included professional and business services as well as the health care industry. The professional and business services industries, which includes the aforementioned administrative and clerical positions, added 51,000 jobs in March. This equates to a total of 533,000 jobs in the industry in a 12-month period.
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