Northrop Grumman Corp. has 400 job openings in Southern California. The City of Los Angeles has 1,000 civilian job openings, plus 1,000 police openings.
And the state could gain 5,400 jobs if the huge Joint Strike Fighter contract, which is to be awarded within weeks, goes to the team being led by Lockheed Martin Corp. and includes Northrop. Boeing Co., L.A. County’s largest private employer, is leading a competing team.
So who says the job market is so tough?
Of course, those few bright spots don’t mask an overall economic climate that remains bleak. The unemployment rate in Los Angeles County, at 5.8 percent as of September, is likely to climb once the effects of the Sept. 11-related layoffs are taken into account. And the Los Angeles Times’ Sunday help-wanted listings fell to a mere 14 pages last week, down from 26 pages just a year ago.
But through it all, companies are still hiring. They may not be advertising, and they may be taking longer to fill positions, but with the right fit, top talent is finding a home.
“There is always a war for the best people,” said Caroline W. Nahas, managing director at executive recruiter Korn Ferry International. “The better companies are, quite frankly, taking advantage of this.”
Among the hottest areas: defense, financial services especially bankruptcy and security.
“We’re talking to some people from New York and other financial markets,” said Mike Rosenberg, managing director and head of the institutional restructuring group at Barrington Associates. His group, which works with financially distressed companies, has gone from three or four members to seven in the past year, and he expects to hire another three professionals lawyers or operating managers by January.
“We’re seeing quite a number of resumes from some extremely highly qualified people, and it’s our thought that they’re maybe not being recognized by the larger firms,” Rosenberg said.
Corporate expansion
Other companies are actually pursuing growth plans.
“We have aggressive expansion goals in Southern California,” said Don Meyer, managing director of Chicago-based Cohen Financial, a real-estate finance company. “It is the largest commercial real estate market in the country, and for us to be truly a national company we need to have a very effective presence.”
At Steven Myers & Associates in Newport Beach, President and General Manager Tom Amrhein said he’s picking up 15 to 20 employees a month often engineers, financial analysts or scheduling managers who have been let go in restructurings.
Steven Myers’ main business, defense-related proposal management, involves a lot of consulting work, allowing these new employees to travel to distant job sites without uprooting families from the L.A. area. “They can keep their home. They’re not forced to relocate,” Amrhein said.
Some companies are hiring in certain areas as they cut back in others. Northrop Grumman has 400 openings in Southern California the appetite for software engineers is particularly acute. That’s little consolation to the 500 employees who will be downsized by Northrop as it consolidates facilities inherited in the April acquisition of Litton Industries.
With so many resumes crossing their desks, many companies see little need to advertise for open positions. When they do, many are inundated with resumes.
Using headhunters
“We’re not really hiring per se, but having said that, we just hired two people,” said Paul Aronzon, who heads the financial restructuring practice at the Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy law firm.
Even headhunters admit it’s a buyer’s market. “I can’t remember a time when there were so many talented people looking for work,” said Fran Pomerantz, managing director of Pomerantz Group in Santa Monica.
Personal contacts still help. And for some employers, hiring a known quantity is a safer bet.
Shannon Johnson left public relations firm Cerrell Associates Inc. for a job with the Al Gore presidential campaign in 2000. A family illness kept her away from Los Angeles until August. But she kept in touch with her colleagues at Cerrell, and when she returned she had a job.
Hal Dash, Cerrell’s president, said Johnson came to him as he was filling some vacancies. He much preferred to re-hire her than take a risk with an unknown candidate. “We wanted her back anyway,” Dash said. “We kind of kept her seat warm and she came back and filled it.”
Broadening interests
Julia Goldberg, who was laid off last June from struggling Web consultancy Razorfish, said she’s been broadening her search from advertising and digital new media assignments to industries like finance, insurance and consumer products. She’s also willing to relocate something she’d never have done six months ago. “I’m figuring that perhaps new media is tapped out,” she said. “Maybe over the fence, that’s where the pot of gold is.”
One area many job seekers are rediscovering is the public sector.
About 3,000 people showed up for a recent L.A. city job fair geared at laid-off airport workers, said Theresa Adams Lopez, a spokeswoman for the city’s personnel department that is looking to fill 1,000 civilian job openings and 1,000 police openings.
“We’re pretty excited about (911 operator vacancies),” Adams Lopez said. Out-of-work airline counter and ticketing agents are well suited for those jobs, which pay $39,000 to $49,000 to start, she said.
“A lot of people are looking to work for the government because private industry is so unpredictable,” said Maureen Tighe, U.S. Trustee for California’s Central District of the federal Bankruptcy Court.
As bankruptcy petitions gear up, Tighe is adding staff for the first time in three years. “We’ve seen a tremendously good quality of applicants,” she said.
