Update the holiday hiring scene

Note to elves: Don’t call us … we’ll call you.

That seems to be the unspoken national trend in seasonal hiring again this year. Consulting firm The Hay Group reported recently that retailers it surveyed plan to hire from 5 percent to 25 percent fewer temp workers this fall than last.

Chain Store Age cites the aptly named consultancy Challenger, ray & Christmas in predicting a possible uptick over 2008’s dismal holiday jobs market, which employed 384,000 extra workers, or little more than half of the temporary help hired in 2007.

Either way, as the fall and winter festivals loom, a good percentage of your audience likely is wondering: What holiday jobs are out there, and is it too late to snare one? Ever the eavesdropper, I’ve overheard such queries from customer to clerk in no fewer than three stores recently. So before the Halloween goblins fly, you can’t go wrong with a localized update on holiday hiring.

SnagAJob.com, the employment Web site for hourly positions, hosts a seasonal jobs Web page; its tips are aimed at workers but can help you generate story angles too. For example, the site notes, stores aren’t the only target for people seeking temporary work.

Restaurants, resorts, banquet halls and other catering facilities need extra helpers, too. Shippers such as UPS and FedEx may hire more people to process packages. Extra traffic at shopping and entertainment venues means more work for greeters, cleaners and other low-skill jobs.

Other angles:

How the hiring process is shifting. Many retailers have made online applications mandatory; thwarting talented self-promoters and people without reliable computer access. Talk with hiring managers and temp firm counselors to create a tips box for job seekers. How likely is it that a seasonal job will lead to a permanent post?

Perks and discounts. Which workers reap the best benefits – wages, markdowns, free meals and entertainment. Which jobs are most fun and which are the most thankless?

Day-in-the-life. While trite, these stories can be a scream, enhanced by audio, video and slide shows. I once was forced by my editor to work a 6 a.m. shift the day after Thanksgiving at a local Target, then rush to the newsroom and whip up a 40-inch feature about my one and only retail experience to date. I nearly got stampeded handing out the freebies at the start of the stint and later got so caught up in finding a “Doodlebug” stuffed animal for a frantic mom that I forgot I really didn’t work there.

A couple of years ago, a chagrinned young co-worker reluctantly donned the stylish yet practical brown uniform of a UPS driver – complete with watch cap and boots – to spend a day hefting packages aboard the open delivery trucks. It made for quite a read.

Any jobs story should have long-term context; for historical jobless data, refer to the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment situation report. For forecasts, check with your region’s Federal Reserve bank or check out this National Association for Business Economics study, released Monday, predicting national unemployment rates at or near 10 percent through the end of 2010.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Labor Day look ahead

Labor Day is a week away, and with jobs – or the lack thereof – as the topic of the year, you’ve barely time to plan and execute a compelling labor package for next weekend.

The fates – and the feds – are cooperating, with the monthly spate of employment reports due out later this week. They include:

• Tuesday: The ADP Employment Report. Produced by the nationwide payroll processor Automatic Data Processing Inc., which claims to pay one out of every six workers in the country, the report is based on ADP’s inside view of the payroll situation among its 500,000 clients. Sign up here for free e-mail releases.

The ADP report is of interest because of its scope and because it distinguishes between the manufacturing and service sectors, and provides a breakdown based on size of business by number of employees.

• Wednesday: U.S. Department of Labor’s productivity report - includes wage and hours-worked data.

• Thursday: U.S. Department of Labor’s weekly initial jobless claims report.

• Friday: The big one: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment situation report. For a review of the data compiled in this monthly roundup, check out my previous tipsheets on the job reports.

Another helpful report just issued: the American Staffing Association’s second-quarter survey, which shows that temporary employment continued to stabilize throughout spring and early summer. Since some analysts believe temporary and contract hiring picks up before the permanent job market does, it’s a handy benchmark to understand.

But those are layering tools; you don’t want to petrify your audience with bare statistics. Some ideas for compelling packages (which also lend themselves to video and animated graphics, as well as print-and-save infoboxes for readers) include:

• Employment forecast Q&A with eight or 12 of your area’s major employers. Don’t forget colleges and universities, health systems, state and local government and nonprofits as well as corporate and small business employers. This makes for a great infographic or other alternative storytelling technique.

• A recap of union membership in your region; highlight gains, losses and trends but also talk with officials and labor relations experts about new paradigms in union-employer cooperation.

• Select a neighborhood, an apartment building, a street and canvass it, mapping out the employment situation in each household compared to a year ago.

• Take the contrarian tack and find success stories. Some people are thriving despite the recession, snaring good jobs at great salaries. Locate them and share their tips.

• Retraining. What public programs are in the works, what are private employers and economic development agencies planning, what courses of study (like nursing) are overbooked, what are mid-career, displaced workers doing to find a new niche? Readers love career makeover features and they’re an inspiring flip side to a dismal jobs scene.

• Track your local workforce. Collect data on the average salaries of local residents in different professions. Feature a person from each occupation and list key statistics about their area of employment.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

More autos news ahead

Don’t park those cash-for-clunkers notebooks just yet.

Automakers release August sales figures Tuesday afternoon, and the closely-watched monthly reports will get an even bigger buzz than usual because they’ll reflect results of the federal Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) program that ended this week.

The $3 billion CARS rebates drove sales of nearly 700,000 vehicles, according to this U.S. Department of Transportation release. According to the breakdown, domestic car companies captured less than 40 percent of those sales, with transplants and foreign automakers luring the majority of buyers.

That’s one angle, depending on the dealer, supplier and factory mix in your territory.

For links to other clunker cash resources, review this past tipsheet.

A recent article from The Arizona Republic noted that although there's a paperwork delay, vehicle sales can be monitored through the number of titles issued by your state's motor vehicle division. And the article also suggested tracking auto sales through taxable-sales reported.

Another still-timely topic: Rebate red tape. Computers glitches snarled paperwork mid-week and I know at least one car buyer who won’t be driving home in her new vehicle for another week or so, until her sales rep has his government cash in hand. How many other deals languish in limbo, and how’s the restricted cash flow affecting auto retailers’ operations?

And what’s the sales plan for the balance of 2009, which some analysts say now is skewed because late-year shoppers rushed in ahead of schedule to snap up rebates. Do local lenders and auto retailers have promotional plans, financing, inventory and other tools at hand to keep the momentum going?

How is this new-car frenzy affecting the used-vehicle market? While traded-in clunkers will be destroyed, not resold, some of the top CARS sellers - including the Toyota Corolla, Honda Accord and Ford F150- are perennial pre-owned favorites. Check the classifieds and Craigslist to see if private and commercial sellers are now stuck with unwanted stock.

From an economic standpoint: the DOT claims that CARS saved 42,000 jobs – do any of them belong to your readers? Ford and GM have boosted production, ostensibly due to increased demand.

For general hints on covering auto sales, check out this earlier tipsheet.

Be sure to sign up at PR Newswire so you’ll get the auto sales reports via e-mail as they trickle out Sept. 1(in no particular order, though Ford usually is first)

If you’re new to covering the automotive industry, get up to speed by reading J.D. Power and Associates’ commentary on the monthly global sales reports they make available free of charge to registered users at their automotive forecasting Web site.

To be really au courant on cars, subscribe to the free e-mail feed at Automotive News.
And in one last shameless plug: My former colleagues at The Detroit News make autos coverage a 24/7 crusade; bookmark their portal for a steady stream of authoritative news, reviews, blogs and special reports.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Tracking the Supply Chain

We’re in for another smorgasbord of economic reports this week, with key statistics about jobs, industry, credit and housing on the agenda.

Some of this macro data normally wouldn’t get much of a look – outside of certain analysts’ offices – in the sluggish weeks leading up to Labor Day. But this is no ordinary August, with the ongoing summer rally in U.S. stock markets, relatively upbeat GDP and car sales numbers and other signs prompting pundits to whisper of an end to the recession.

Take time to digest the Institute for Supply Management releases out this week. This trade group for supply and logistics professionals has been publishing these closely watched surveys since 1931. Monday’s ISM manufacturing report, which showed that sector still is weak but getting stronger, drove much of yesterday’s market gains, shoving the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indices to peaks not reached since last fall.

Out tomorrow is the mirror image of Monday’s release: the ISM Non-manufacturing survey. It reports on activity in sectors as wide-ranging as pet care, dry cleaning, entertainment, forestry and utilities, among many others. Each report is issued monthly; peruse the site for the methodology behind these reports, which are based on input from managers at the ISM’s member companies.

Keep in mind that despite the ISM’s focus on supply, the surveys deal with a variety of data from prices to employment to inventory levels; you can use the macro results to formulate questions for companies in your region. How are they faring compared to the national average?

Supply and logistics might sound sort of dry but is actually a rich source of ideas and information. And one way or another probably employs a good segment of your audience. Another trade group, the Council of Supply Chain Management Officials, offers educational resources and factoids on its Web site and says that the U.S. spending on logistics is larger than the GDP of all but 10 countries on the planet.

Definitely a sector worth understanding, and you’ll be well served by getting to know the players in your territory. If you’ve a shipping port or airport handy, start there, because transportation clearly is a huge part of the nation’s supply chain. Trucking firms, trucking schools, warehouses, service hubs – the list of story-worthy companies is legion. And it’s not all car parts on pallets – think Netflix or Amazon.com or livestock for interesting story springboards.

Other supply and logistics resources include the international Supply Chain Council, about the and oddly enough, a Logistics forum on About.com. This list of supply chain resources, courtesy of the University of Wisconsin library system, also is very helpful.

Housing data heads-up

Just a reminder that the National Association of Realtors monthly pending home sales index also is being released today; at the very least you’ll want to get a short story up on your Web site. Here’s a look back at an earlier tipsheet on localizing real estate stats.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

All Eyes on Automakers

Monthly U.S. auto sales tallies are always closely watched, but Monday’s numbers will be especially interesting because they’ll reflect a full week of sales under the federal "cash for clunkers" program.

Automotive sales, of course, have spent the past year in a free fall, sending General Motors and Chrysler to bankruptcy court and Capitol Hill for concessions. Thousands of workers have been furloughed, bought out, retired early or laid off.

Here’s how drastic the drop has been: In 2007, U.S. consumers wheeled away in some 16 million new cars trucks. This year, the most upbeat forecasters predict total sales of – maybe – 10 million vehicles. That’s nearly a 40 percent drop in two years – meaning 40 percent less revenue for pretty much the entire supply chain and everyone connected with auto retailers.

So even if you don’t have a car company headquarters or factory in your territory, chances are a good number of your readers have a vested industry in the health of the auto industry.(After all, as taxpayers they now own a majority stake in GM!)

The automakers – including the U.S. units of transplant and overseas companies, report monthly sales a day or two after the last business session of the previous month. Autodata Corp., an information service for the industry, posts the release calendar and year-to-date figures free of charge on its Web site.

The June tally is up now; take a look to make sure you understand the terminology. First you’ll see the year-over-year results – last June compared to this June, in raw numbers and in percentage-point change. (Those are the negative numbers in the third column, for most brands.) The next three columns are cumulative sales year-to-date, compared to the same period in 2008.

You also should understand SAAR – that is, the seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales, a measure of how many cars could be expected to sell in a year if the pace of the current month continues.

Autodata also provides an aggregated spreadsheet at the end of the day to some media outlets; the reports are a valuable shortcut in creating charts and info boxes. The firm has been inundated of late with media requests and might switch to a paid subscription, so don’t put away your calculator just yet. Meanwhile, a polite request to media@motorintelligence.com may just get you a coveted spot on their distribution list.

Another way to prep: Check out the company-by-company forecasts by industry watchers such as Edmunds.com; while not infallible, these predictions can help you get a feel for the story-du-jour in auto sales. Sometimes it’s external forces like the current rebate program; other months it’s the horse race for the No. 1 position or the dive in truck and SUV demand.

Individual company releases (sign up for them at individual automaker media Web sites or via PR Newswire – and do it today, not Monday) come in no particular order and trickle out after noon on the appointed date – leaving you the morning free to troll dealerships for retailer and consumer comments.

Check around today to see if you can sit in on (and video) the closing of a new-car deal Monday morning; hearing the voice of a consumer who decided to take the plunge – and the reasoning behind his or her purchase – will add quite a bit of human interest to what can seem like a dry numbers story. With billions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake, car sales reports these days are anything but routine.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Covering Temp Firms

If you’re looking for a fresh angle to the jobs story, a couple of imminent earnings reports will give you a timely news peg.

Tomorrow, staffing industry giant Manpower Inc., reports quarterly financial results. And next week, on July 28, its equally global counterpart Kelly Services Inc. releases earnings, giving you ample reason to report a solid and audience-friendly piece on the state of temporary work in your region.

Temping is a viable income stream for many of your readers and a way for displaced workers to keep a toehold in the workforce. Don’t overlook the industry as a source of work-life stories and job-market forecasts.

Robert Half International Inc., parent of Accounttemps and other contingent-workforce firms, posted its second-quarter results last week. Revenue was down to $749 million from $1.2 billion in the same period a year before, while profits plummeted to $5.4 million $74.6 million a year ago.

But while they’ve taken the same economic hits as most other industries, staffing firms represent a multi-billion-dollar annual business, with more than 2 million workers a day being placed in assignments that can last a day or a year. Demand for temps dropped sharply in late 2008 but the pace of the fallout is slowing so far this year. It also, analysts say, tends to rebound sooner than the permanent job market, so temping activity can be a bellwether of employment activity in your region.

Some 6,000 firms operate about 20,000 branches nationwide, so it shouldn’t be hard to find sources and anecdotes. Niche firms abound, serving sectors from health care to autos to construction. Not surprisingly, the smaller shops are more accessible than the publicly-traded corporations. Try several for a frank discussion about what they are seeing in your territory, what concerns them and what their forecast is for the balance of the year.

The American Staffing Association, a national trade group, operates a helpful Web site and its state-by-state chapter directory
can help you home in on local contacts. The site also features industry FAQs and other materials in its media relations channel.

Another avenue: Talk to major employers about their outlook for hiring temps. Don’t overlook government agencies, universities and K-12 school districts; they rely on staffing firms to fill temp posts ranging from scientists to substitute teachers.

The consulting firm Staffing Industry Analysts offers a free daily e-mail feed; sign up at the site. While not primarily intended as a media resource, their consulting staff may be available to comment on trends or point you toward statistics.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.