Based entirely on how long a job stays online, truck drivers and nurses are the toughest jobs in the nation to fill.
The latter is not much of a surprise. Newspapers, blogs, and healthcare networks are full of reports about how tough it is to to fill nursing jobs, particularly in such specialties as surgical, critical care, and emergency.
However, the difficulty in hiring truck drivers has gotten far less publicity even as recruiting experienced drivers has become tougher.
Wanted Analytics says the average time online for a truck driver job is 55 days. That’s up 20 percent since March, when Wanted reported the average posting period was about 6.5 weeks.
It’s not at all unusual to see trucking companies offering signing bonuses and enticing trucking couples with promises to keep them together on driving assignments. Help wanted notices are as common on the back of tractor trailers as are the “How am I driving?” surveys.
In March, Wanted said there were 142,000 driver jobs online in the New York Metro area alone. So serious has the shortage of drivers become that The Journal of Commerce analyzed the impact in a special report recently. Its Trucking Employment Index shows a near straight line rise over the last few years.
Recent tightening of federal rules that, among other things, cut 12 hours out of the allowable weekly driving time is going to cause even greater shortages, reports CNNMoney. Citing Roz Wilson, a senior analyst with the Delcan Corporation, CNNMoney says the new rules could create a need for as many as 100,000 more drivers.
The industry also suffers from turnover that’s almost 100 percent, rivaling food service and retail.
In March, Wanted said its analysis of job posting data found that the number of jobs for truck drivers for the previous 90 days topped 230,000; a 20 percent increase over the same 90 days a year before. After dipping in summer 2012, the monthly job counts for drivers has been steadily creeping up.
Wanted’s most recent analysis lists the average length of time a posting remains online for the most in-demand jobs in the nation. These are the most frequently posted job openings as determined by Wanted’s compilation of listings from tens of thousands of corporate sites, job boards, and listing services in the U.S.
As might be expected, software developers made the list, as did web developers. But placing ahead of both in the length of time a listing remains online are jobs for retail workers and supervisors. Marketing managers are also becoming increasingly harder to find as business picks up.
In another expected finding, ads for first-line supervisors of office and administrative workers — office managers, for example — stay online on average of a day longer than those for web developers.