With what seems to be and endless stream of mixed messages regarding jobs and employment these days, I thought this new Index from Intuit offers a bright spot that’s worth sharing. While the numbers aren’t earth shattering, they certainly bare out what we have been seeing and hearing from our own customers.
According to the just released Intuit Small Business Employment Index, small businesses, companies with fewer than 20 employees (as defined by Intuit) have been cautiously adding to their payrolls.
The Intuit Small Business Employment Index, released March 1st, is based on data from 50,000 customers of the software maker’s online payroll service. It finds that Companies with less than 20 employees have been adding new jobs since June 2009.
According to the index, “employment grew nearly 0.8 percent over the past eight months, which is 1.1 percent at an annual rate. This translates into nearly 40,000 new jobs for February 2010 and nearly 150,000 new jobs since June 2009”.
“Employment for these small businesses began trending upward in mid-2009, a good sign for the overall economy,” said Dr. Susan Woodward, the nationally-recognized economist who worked with Intuit to create the index. This index is an indicator that the small business employment situation may be getting better,” added Woodward, who was chief economist of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and later of the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Small businesses generally recover faster than larger businesses because they begin hiring sooner than big businesses. To see these figures showing a rise in employment at small businesses is very heartening at a time when good news is scarce.”
At Eon Applications, Inc we have seen an uptick in sales for both our applicant tracking and recruiting software business lines from small businesses looking to manage their talent acquisition needs.
While the index doesn’t reflect the kind of numbers that will be needed to turn the employment picture around, it’s defiantly a step in the right direction.