Minnesota has more job openings than job seekers

Minnesota hiring managers reported 114,000 job vacancies in the fourth quarter of 2017, but the ratio of job-seekers is down to 0.8 per opening.

Those figures top the latest biannual Job Vacancy Survey from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. Total vacancies were up 16 percent from the same period in 2016, and the vacancy rate rose from 3.6 percent to 4.2 percent at the end of 2017.

The vacancies in the fourth quarter are the highest DEED has seen for that period in surveys dating to 2001, said Oriane Casale, assistant director of DEED’s Labor Market Information Office. Still, the number of vacancies was down from 123,000 in the survey during the second quarter of 2017.

“This means that employers are going to have to dig deep,” Casale said in an interview Thursday. “I have a feeling it’s going to be a fantastic summer for teen employment if this continues.”

Broken down by industry, the survey shows that construction employers reported 5,067 vacancies, a rate of 4.2 percent, while manufacturing reported 10,105 openings for a vacancy rate of 3.2 percent. Both rates are slightly improved from the second-quarter survey but well above where they were a year ago, when both industries reported 2.4 percent of their openings were unfilled.

Other fields have been hit even harder by workforce shortages. The latest survey puts job vacancy rates in retail at 6.6 percent, and accommodation and food services at 7 percent.

“It really is the lower-wage occupations’ employers having a hard time filling right now,” Casale said. “And there’s just a lot of turnover in these occupations, so employers are often just always looking for new workers.”

The supply of workers continues to dwindle. The number of unemployed people per vacancy fell to 0.8, down from 0.9 six months ago and 1.1 in 2016. Before this year, vacancies hadn’t outnumbered job seekers since early 2001.

Twin Cities employers can expect an especially hard time finding workers. Vacancies in the seven-county metro area were up 19.3 percent from a year ago, and there were just 0.6 job seekers per vacancy to fill them.

The statewide shortage is driving a modest 2.6 percent increase in wage offers from a year ago, Casale said, as well as drawing people from the sidelines into the workforce.

“We would expect the labor force participation rate to be dropping because so many people are retiring and leaving the labor force,” she said. “However … we haven’t seen the kind of drop-off we might have expected. The tight labor market seems to be keeping people in the labor force and drawing more people into it than we might have expected.”

The survey also found that as of the fourth quarter, 41 percent of vacancies were for part-time work, 9 percent were temporary or seasonal, 55 percent offered health insurance, and 32 percent called for education beyond a high school diploma.

• Job Vacancy Survey 4Q 2017
• Minnesota job vacancies remain high