Who's Hiring and Who's Not?

With all the pull backs in hiring, layoff, etc. it is getting hard to find companies with any openings. So, out of curiosity, I made a list of 33 companies I've been asked about recently and ranked them by their perspective job openings versus their number of current employees. The chart below is the top ranked companies in my list. For those of you concerned about "American Jobs", I added a column that describes the percentage of job openings for this company that are on American soil as opposed to overseas. These companies look to be expanding or at least investing in new product development.

Company	Stock	Employees	Ranking	US-Made
Adobe	ADBE	1070	16.26%	44.25%
Infinera	INFN	711	9.14%	63.08%
Concur Technology	CNQR	932	5.69%	75.47%
Websense	WBSN	1238	5.49%	33.82%
Interwoven	IWOV	991	5.35%	13.21%

Along the same lines, the following chart describes the bottom of my list in terms of the companies with the fewest job openings with respect to the number of current employees. Some of these probably come as no surprise, while others you might not expect to see there. These companies appear to be acting overly conservative which might be a good thing or potentially slow their recovery.

Company	Stock	Employees	Ranking	US-Made
Avnet	AVT	12800	0.27%	88.24%
Comscope	CTV	15500	0.25%	50.00%
Symantec	SYMC	17600	0.15%	88.89%
ADC Telecommunications	ADCT	10600	0.14%	73.33%
Western Digital	WDC	50072	0.13%	6.25%

Through this exercise, one particular company popped out as interesting to me, and not just because it came in near the top or the bottom but because of the type of job openings listed. The jobs listed by this company were not only extremely technical but clearly something is in the makes as you just don't see companies trying to hire this focused of a technical group that often.

Company	Stock	Employees	Ranking	US-Made
Micros Systems	MCRS	4619	1.28%	81.36%

Stock position: None.

Comments

[Munger75:]

Can you elaborate on your comments regarding MCRS?

thanks

Jan 23 12:43 PM

[Bruce Bahlmann:]

Regarding my comment on MCRS:

"...because of the type of job openings listed. The jobs listed by this company were not only extremely technical but clearly something is in the makes as you just don't see companies trying to hire this focused of a technical group that often."

MCRS has jobs posted for engineers, technicians, analysts, product, sales, customer support, implementation, and marketing types. When you look at other companies, they are generally hiring in a few narrow areas like sales people or some software engineers. MCRS seems to be hiring everything plus the kitchen sink. When you are expanding you need fill multiple roles versus when you are contracting or laying idle you don't need to fill multiple roles. Based on what I've seen from my list, this companies job openings are vastly different from the other similar sized companies.

Jan 23 01:51 PM

[VolantSki:]

Just an observation on MCRS and listings in general on websites. I find that often companies will place position descriptions from "trolling purposes" and really do not have open reqs. Sometimes this is done intentionally to appear to have a growth strategy and in other cases simple laziness in updating old jobs from when they created the site originally!

Jan 23 04:40 PM

[LHCM:]

No sure how you get the number for ADBE. It just laid off 600 folks (most of them in NA) and has not identified a promising growth area. (It tries but yet found a good one). So I don't a possibility that they will increase their head counter dramatically as you listed in the table. Perhaps, you can let us know how you derive those numbers?

Jan 23 05:43 PM

[Bruce Bahlmann:]

Regarding the question:

"Perhaps, you can let us know how you derive those numbers?"

Here were my numbers for ADBE
Employees: 1070
Jobs Posted:174
US: 77
Abroad: 97

Note that I've seen "trolling" but generally its done within a particular area (like trolling for good product managers or other KEY hires). My numbers came from current job postings on company websites and represented (what looks to be) real job openings. Its an interesting datapoint.

Jan 28 10:58 AM