Soft spring hiring season forecast in Cape Breton

A human resource consulting firm that tracks employment trends is forecasting a soft spring hiring season in Cape Breton.

The latest Manpower Group employment outlook survey for the second quarter of 2017, from April to June.

“For Cape Breton, unfortunately, it is predicting a quiet hiring climate,” Julianna Ross Brooks of Manpower’s Halifax office said in an interview.

“After talking and surveying the local businesses and organizations in Cape Breton, there’s not a lot of hiring plans coming up. There’s about 18 per cent of employers who are planning on hiring, but that is kind of counteracted by about six per cent that are anticipating cutbacks.”

Another 76 per cent of employers plan to maintain their current staffing levels in the upcoming quarter.

When seasonal variations are removed from the data, Cape Breton’s second quarter net employment outlook, which is about three per cent, is an eight percentage point decrease when compared to the previous quarterly outlook. It is also a decrease of two percentage points from the outlook reported during the same period in 2016.

“It’s not a major decline, but it is showing a bit of a dip, year over year,” Ross Brooks said. “It’s not unique just to Cape Breton, we’re seeing that across Canada.”

Manpower started adjusting its survey results for seasonality a few years ago.

Part of the year-to-year decline in Cape Breton could be related to the general loss of population and therefore shrinking size of the workforce, Ross Brooks said.

The Cape Breton numbers also generally reflect what is anticipated in Atlantic Canada as a whole, which has an overall outlook of three per cent.

Nationally, the second quarter of 2017 is expected to see modest gains for Canadian job seekers.