PORTLAND, Maine — For an indication of Maine’s tightening job market, look no further than Craigslist. After about a decade as a free service, the popular website began charging $25 per job listing in January.
The move signals the San Francisco commerce website’s belief that employer demand in Maine has matured enough to start charging, a point echoed by other observers. Craigslist did not respond to a request for comment sent through its website.
“The job market is definitely a lot tighter than it has been in the past six or seven years,” said Jeremy Haskell, director of sales for Jobs in the U.S., which operates the subscription-based job posting site JobsinME.com.
The best available numbers bear that out, as the state’s unemployment rate hit levels last seen in the early 2000s. Those numbers raise other questions about what’s really going on in Maine’s job market, but Haskell said his site has seen the effects.
“We used to post and get 10 or 15 applicants in the first 24 to 48 hours, and we’re not seeing that as much anymore,” Haskell said.
Haskell said the change drove some longtime clients to leave in search of other ways to connect with employees, “and then they come back because they’ve found even less in other places.”
It also means people are trying to carve out niches for hiring in specific industries. One example comes from Portland’s increasingly crowded restaurant scene.
Entrepreneur David Higham earlier this year released a beta version of a software platform he developed specifically to help restaurants manage and track interested applicants through a database instead of a pile of differently formatted resumes that may get emailed in response to a Craigslist ad.
In an industry with relatively high turnover, Higham said his Red Door Network program aims to help managers pull up applicants with specific skills on the fly, something he saw a need for while managing a restaurant in Tahoe City, California.
“Say two weeks later a bartender just walks out — they can either go back to that big thick folder and find that person or in our system they simply go into our filter search query and they can get right to that person,” Higham said.
For his first solo project, he landed in Portland at the right time, he said.
“I literally could not imagine a better place,” he said, noting the surge in restaurant business and support from groups promoting entrepreneurs in the state, including the Maine Technology Institute and the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development.
Higham moved to Maine about six years ago and has been working for about two years to get his restaurant software up and running. He said has about 15 restaurants that agreed to use the software and provide feedback. Eventually, he said, it will be a paid service.
Business owners seeking workers in skilled trades, specialized service sectors, health care, hospitality and more have in the past year expressed concern about being able to find employees and about workforce development more broadly.
Haskell said his subscriber-based job site and national job boards have long awaited that post-recession shift in the job market. That’s part of what’s creating a market for businesses even within the world of job posting businesses, such as Higham’s.
Ed McKersie, a founder of the JobsinME website and owner of the recruiting firm ProSearch, last year launched a new kind of recruitment site that focuses on profiles of regions and employers rather than specific job listings.
“It’s not surprising to see these kinds of niche sites, because lots of people are looking for work,” Haskell said.
Where the job market’s tightest
Federal figures indicate unemployment in Greater Portland is below 3 percent in some areas, a level at or near the benchmark of full employment, where the number of people out of work is at about the level of estimated job openings in the area.
Anecdotes relayed to the Maine Department of Labor have bolstered that sense of a tightening labor market.
Julie Rabinowitz, spokeswoman for the department, said department staff have taken note of restaurants around Route 111 in Biddeford advertising not only work but specific hourly or monthly pay.
In the Bangor area, most towns had an average unemployment rate in the range of 4 to 6 percent (Bangor’s was 4.1 percent), with rates below 4 percent in Brewer, Hermon, Hampden and Orrington.
[tableau server=”public.tableau.com” workbook=”Localandcountyunemployment2015″ view=”Joblessstory?:showVizHome=no” tabs=”no” toolbar=”yes” revert=”” refresh=”” linktarget=”” width=”100%” height=”735px”][/tableau]
Rabinowitz said she expects the labor market will continue to tighten and push up wages, which grew at the fastest rate in more than a decade at the start of 2015, according to Glenn Mills, chief economist for the Maine Department of Labor’s Center for Workforce Research and Information.
But Mills has some questions about what’s really going on with Maine’s workforce, as recent survey data show on one hand a sharp decline in the workforce while another survey indicates more people on company payrolls.
“The only thing that I know is that the two surveys can’t both be right,” Mills said.
What’s going on with the jobless rate?
The unemployment rate is the mix of two estimates: how many people are looking for work and how many people have jobs.
If the total number with jobs goes up, the unemployment rate goes down. It also goes down when it’s estimated that fewer people are in the labor force, or looking for work.
That’s what happened last year, when the average monthly labor force estimate dropped in each county, either as the employment estimate held steady or dipped.
The charts below track county-level change in the labor force estimate and those employed, starting in the year 2000.
[tableau server=”public.tableau.com” workbook=”Localandcountyunemployment2015″ view=”Convergence?:showVizHome=no” tabs=”no” toolbar=”yes” revert=”” refresh=”” linktarget=”” width=”100%” height=”535px”][/tableau]
The result of those lower labor force estimates was a falling unemployment rate in each of the counties.
[tableau server=”public.tableau.com” workbook=”Localandcountyunemployment2015″ view=”Joblessrate?:showVizHome=no” tabs=”no” toolbar=”yes” revert=”” refresh=”” linktarget=”” width=”100%” height=”535px”][/tableau]
But Mills said he’s not convinced the labor force in Maine is actually dwindling quite so fast. He also doubts the relatively stagnant job growth estimated from the household surveys.
Either disparity could have some effect on the real share of people out of work.
The government’s measure of unemployment is based on a monthly household survey. The responses are weighted and amplified to reflect the estimate of the rest of the population. That survey got smaller in Maine last year, by about 35 percent.
Mills suspects that and other dynamics of the survey — how it rotates households in and out of the sample — may have something to do with the estimate of the state’s workforce dropping.
“It’s going to be interesting going forward what the data looks like and how much we can trust it,” Mills said.
More reliable surveys of employer payrolls were up last year. That count covers a vast majority of jobs, and Mills said the payroll job increase has been confirmed by much more detailed but slower developing information that comes directly from employers, through the unemployment insurance system.
Mills told the Legislature’s revenue forecasting committee in January that those two measures have tended to go in different directions during economic recovery periods, though he said in a telephone interview he’s not sure why that happens.
“I just continue to put much more faith in the real job count [from payroll surveys],” Mills said.
Those payroll surveys showed employment in December hit 612,000, up by about 8,600 compared with one year earlier. As the recession hit in December 2007, the estimate of all payroll jobs in Maine was 620,700.
Over the long-term, Mills said he expects payroll data will confirm a steady rise in employment as Maine’s workforce declines gradually because of baby boomers aging out of the workforce with fewer young people to replace them.
“I’m hoping that’s what proves to be true,” Mills said. “How much is reality and how much is problems with the surveys and all of that — I’m not sure.”