Job Market

Rob McGovern started the job search website CareerBuilder.com in 1994 when the Internet as we know it today was in its infancy. Five years later, at the height of the dot-com bubble, McGovern took the company public. It had monthly traffic of about 10 million job seekers at the time, he said. The following year CareerBuilder was sold to Tribune Co. (the parent company of The Baltimore Sun) and Knight Ridder in the first of what would be two transactions and an ultimate price tag of more than $500 million.

From Jay Hancock's Blog: Unemployment rose and employers added fewer jobs than expected last month, the Labor Department announced this morning. Employers added only 39,000 jobs last month. Analysts had expected a bump of about 150,000. In prior months this year you could blame poor employment results on the Census. The program was laying off tens of thousands of temporary workers, which depressed the overall job-growth results. The the Census has pretty much downsized by now, so the shrinkage in government jobs last month is about something else -- perhaps states laying off employees now that federal stimulus money is running out. But there are some slightly bright spots.

Fresh out of high school, Royal Brown had no job experience and was facing the toughest summer for teen employment in six decades when he went looking for work in June. A few months later, the 18-year-old Rosedale resident's prospects are brightening. Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake is training him and 17 other young men and women in the finer points of retail, complete with internships in its Baltimore-area stores. Brown, who wants to land a job to help pay for college, found that employers weren't willing to take a chance on untested, teenage job candidates, so he's thrilled to be able to get around the roadblock.

Katie Blaha leaves her job in Hunt Valley at 5 p.m. every day to return to a house in Catonsville she shares with roommates who are a good bit older than her and ask a lot of personal questions. Even though she's got solid employment and has weathered the worst of the economic downturn, Blaha, like so many in her generation, is back living with her parents. "I want to save money, so I'm not just getting by," said the 22-year-old who graduated from Washington College in 2009, and spent nearly a year working internships — paid and unpaid — before she could put her degree to use in a marketing firm.

Sudesna Batajoo had resigned herself to another summer job in retail sales. The 20-year-old rising Loyola University junior faced one of the worst job markets in decades and feared she would never get an internship related to her business major, much less one that paid. But then came the unexpected: three offers. After sharply scaling back during the recession, many companies are again expanding internship programs. Both employers and university career centers are seeing stronger demand for interns this year.

Katie Staso's optimism was fading. The University of Maryland senior had mailed 30 resumes in September to give employers time to peruse her internships and solid grades as a chemical engineering major. But as spring approached, she hadn't heard a peep. The St. Mary's City native thought she might become another casualty of the recession. Instead, she and other graduating seniors around Maryland are finding that, if they have a little patience and flexibility, there are employment opportunities in a job market that has improved slightly for the first time since 2008.

Finding a job is tough enough in an economic downturn not seen in decades. But for those with a criminal background, bad credit or substance abuse history, the challenges can seem insurmountable. Not so, says Grace Lee, executive director of Maryland New Directions, a private nonprofit career counseling and job placement agency. She insists that even when jobs are scarcer than usual, the unemployed and those who want to embark on a new career path can start laying the groundwork for their future.

Discouraged job seekers finally have some cause for optimism. After losing roughly 100,000 jobs in two years, Maryland gained jobs in March for the first time in months. Increased job listings in areas such as sales and customer service signal a shift in companies' focus from cost cutting to growth. And some employer surveys show a brighter outlook in which more companies intend to hire than lay workers off. "In '09, everyone was singing the blues," said Peter Francis, who works in the Timonium office of employee search firm MRI Global Search.