Record-low unemployment? Tell that to these 1,300 South Florida job seekers
They came in their branded uniforms from work. They came with their moms, or daughters. They came in their Sunday best.
However they came, hundreds of job seekers turned up Wednesday at the BB&T Center in Sunrise for the last job fair of the year produced by JobNewsUSA.com and Job Post Media.
The unemployment rate for the Miami metro area — which includes Broward and Palm Beach counties — now stands at 3.1 percent. One tick lower, and it will set a record.
But that rate does not measure job security or job satisfaction.
Speaking with a group of the 1,300 attendees, both of those seemed in short supply these days.
Adita Gobin, 31 of Coral Springs, said she had just quit her job as an administrator at a long-term healthcare company, a move she had been planning for some time.
That role had offered little in the way of upward mobility and did not allow her to use her skills in marketing, which she studied in school.
She said she was open to any marketing role and found several promising opportunities at the fair, including at a well-known furniture company.
Andrea Farraldo, 26, a South Florida native who lives in Brickell, said he just returned from a managerial role at a call center in China But so far, he says, he’s only found part-time work. Like Gobin, he was optimistic about landing something through the fair — perhaps at a company looking for someone with customer service experience.
Among those looking to hire was JAE Restaurant Group, one of the largest restaurant franchisees in the southern U.S. A company representative who declined to be named, said the market for individuals with retail experience is strong — but that competition for top qualified candidates remains fierce. Restaurant managers are now able to receive full benefits; salaries start in the mid-30,000s.
JAE was one of the few companies offering full-time jobs. Among the most common jobs on offer Wednesday were insurance sales representatives. Like many of the other positions available at the fair, most of these positions are not full-time — in this case, contractors working under 1099 employment agreements. In other words, giggers.
Still, companies like Waco-based American Income Life said they expected to hire as many as 30 contractors for their new Broward office. A company rep said she had collected 55 resumes by day’s end.
But like many other fairgoers, Taron Morton, 45 of Coral Springs was looking for something more secure. Morton said he was in-between jobs and had come up empty in the three weeks he had been on the market.
“You hear employment is down, but I’ve been finding it difficult” to land a job, he said. He specializes in sales — but is not interested in taking a role that would start at $10 an hour and be mostly commission based.
“It’s a lot of entry-level [pay] rates here,” he said. For a professional with a Master’s degree and years of sales experience, the pickings were few, he said.
And then there was Daniel Jordan, a 23-year-old graduate of Stetson University in Deland. Jordan majored in physics — a STEM field reportedly in high demand.
But Jordan says he’s been looking for four months, with no luck.
“The kinds of jobs I’d want to apply to — there aren’t really any down here” in South Florida.
It’s another dimension of the area’s jobs picture: too few options for highly qualified candidates.
Jordan’s solution? “I’m probably going to get out of here,” he said. “Move up north.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2019 at 6:07 PM.
