The number of job openings for C-level, VP, director, and managerial candidates improved last month for the first time since November, according to the CareerCast.com/JobSerf Employment Index.
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Get Your Report Now!Yet even with the improvement in May, managerial job listings have fallen 41 percent in the past 12 months. The index found that the number of executive and management-level job openings posted online had an index value of 56.6 in May 2009, up from 41.4 in April 2009 but down from 95.8 in May 2008.
"We are encouraged by the latest data, which showed a healthy uptick in demand for managers and executives last month," says Tony Lee, publisher, CareerCast.com. "This positive trend could be the beginning of a reversal of our economic downturn as companies find that they can't wait any longer to recruit for vacant managerial positions."
The slowest regions of the country to recover have been the Midwest and Western states, which have seen only about 60 percent of the gains experienced by the rest of the nation. In comparing metropolitan areas, the Washington, D.C. area remained the highest of the major cities the index evaluates, reporting about eight times as many job listings online per capita as compared to Detroit, which had the lowest.
"Since last September, there had been a rapid deterioration of the volume of jobs online," says Jay Martin, JobSerf's chairman. "However, May's gain in the Index showed an almost complete recovery of the past three months of losses, and in the Northeast and Southeast, job-posting activity is already back to the same levels they were in January."