March was not a good month for employment in Missouri.
A loss of 10,300 jobs – the third most in the nation after Texas and Oklahoma – contributed to a small uptick in the Show-Me State’s monthly unemployment rate of 5.6 percent. Although it was a six-month high, according to the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, it was even higher in the seven-county Ozark Region, at 6.2 percent.
But with news from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, clearer skies might be on the horizon for Missouri job seekers. Regionally, the Midwest had the lowest unemployment rate in America for March, and with 223,000 jobs added nationwide in April, the uncertainty of unemployment appears to be dwindling.
If Springfield job hunters search Indeed.com for postings within a 50-mile radius, they’ll find over 4,000 full-time positions to be filled in such fields as health care, information technology and business management. Postings include over 750 jobs between Mercy and CoxHealth, 136 available through Monett-based Jack Henry & Associates Inc. and 58 at Springfield Public Schools.
“Outside of our website, our biggest tool is Indeed,” said Laura Starks, director of recruitment for Mercy Central Communities, adding openings also are posted to LinkedIn and Facebook.
Cynthia Collins, business services representative for the Missouri Career Center’s Ozark Region, said it’s a good time to be looking for a job in the Springfield area.
“Every industry is hiring and every industry is going strong in our area,” she said. “Anyone who is looking for employment right now, who has skill sets, is positioned correctly.”
Collins said 1,695 jobs currently are posted in the career center’s Ozark Region. However, that’s a 46 percent decrease compared to a MERIC labor market summary for the region in March 2015, which showed 3,136 postings.
On June 9, the career center at 2900 E. Sunshine St. will hold the first in a series of hiring events to help place 200 workers who will become jobless with the year-end closure of the Mammoth Inc. manufacturing plant.
“The market is good, it can definitely absorb them,” Collins said, citing the variety of skilled and supervisory positions coming out of the plant’s closure. “Those skill sets are in high demand in our area. They can transfer into a lot of the industries here.”
With area employers such as Custom Metalcraft Inc. expressing interest in the hiring event, Collins is confident the workers can move into other positions.
For the Ozark Region, MERIC listed manufacturing among the area’s top 10 high-growth industries in third-quarter 2014, based on almost 4 percent growth to employment and wages over the previous year. More than 15,000 employees at nearly 600 firms earned over $160 million in wages during the three-month period.
Over twice as many workers – some 36,000 – are employed in the Ozark Region’s health care and social assistance industry, another high-growth area. Six of the top 10 highest-earning occupations in the region are health care related, and by 2022, four other health care concentrations are projected to expand employment opportunities by some 30 percent.
“Since Cargill went out of business, we have brought on quite a few candidates that were referred through the career center, particularly to environmental services, in the past month,” said Rochelle Yoap, a recruiter for Mercy Hospital Springfield, of new hires brought on since the meat slicing and packaging facility closed its doors in March.
Starks said Mercy seeks to fill 550 vacancies throughout the five-county Springfield metropolitan statistical area and rural facilities in Lebanon, Aurora and Cassville. On May 20, the hospital hosted a hiring event seeking to fill over 50 entry-level and supervisory positions in its environmental and food services departments.
“The interesting thing about health care is it takes all professional disciplines to make a health care organization run,” Starks said. “Spring is usually our biggest recruitment season because we have workers who are becoming licensed, or if they’re graduating in a certain field we’ll see them promote up into those roles.
“It’s going to be a pretty busy few months for us here.”
Another industry with a seasonal influx of new hires is accounting.
John Wanamaker, managing partner of BKD LLP’s Springfield, Branson and Joplin offices, said the accounting firm looks for graduating students at Missouri State University and six other colleges in Missouri and Kansas to fill entry-level positions and internships. One recent addition is a part-time, work-study position for a data analytics specialist to work out of the company’s health care billing department.
“We’re working with Missouri State’s CIS folks over there to identify an up-and-coming student that would have an interest,” Wanamaker said, adding the company hopes to fill the position with a college sophomore or junior-level student. “We just run into things from time to time where having someone with that IT background to work with the team would be beneficial to us. But it is a totally new thing for us to look at.”
The company also has 12 open positions for marketers, accountants and consultants in Springfield advertised on Indeed.com. Wanamaker said offices in his area added a total of 22 jobs within the past year, and 10 newly graduated accounting students will join the firm in July.
In terms of clinical positions at Mercy, Starks said the biggest area of need is nursing.
“If you look at the industry, regionally or even nationally, the demand for nurses is very much outpacing the supply,” Starks said. “That’s a challenge regardless of what health care organization you’re with.”
Turnover is another contributing factor. A 10-year study published August 2014 by the College of Nursing at New York University found 17.5 percent of nurses leave their first job within one year.
“Nurses can be very selective,” Starks said. “Sometimes they want to try out different organizations to gain a lot of different exposure, so we’re seeing that they aren’t staying in one place as long as they previously have.”
