New York Fed Survey Points To Tightening Worker Market

Source: www.TurfMagazine.com

If you think it’s getting tougher to hire employees for your landscape/lawn service companies, specifically workers that possess basic skills, you are not alone.

In fact, a recent survey by The New York Fed reports that it’s taking longer to fill job vacancies. Its recently released Empire State Manufacturing Survey/Business Leaders Survey also strongly suggests that workers’ competencies in basic skills—mathematics, English, interpersonal skills, etc.—seem to be going backwards these past few years. Yet, workers nevertheless expected their pay to go up this year.

The New York Fed released a summary of the results in April.

When the surveys asked how long, on average, it took to fill job openings over the past 12 months, the median manufacturing respondent said 21 days, while the median service sector respondent said 40 days. More than a third of the firms in both surveys reported that the duration of job vacancies had increased compared to 2014, while just 7 percent of the manufacturers and 3 percent of service firms said the duration had declined.

When queried about the difficulty of finding works with specific types of skills, respondents in both surveys reported that those with advanced computer skills were the hardest to find. Moreover, workers will all types of skill sets were said to be somewhat harder to find than in last year’s surveys.

Finally, just 23 percent of service sector respondents and 16 percent of manufacturers expected salaries to remain unchanged, while no respondent projected a decrease. The median expected pay increase was 3 percent among both manufacturers and service firms—up from 2.5 percent and 2 percent, respectively, in the April 2014 surveys.

You can access data from survey here.