Redfish made placements at the Director, Executive and Project Manager levels in January. The preponderance of the hiring was in the Cloud, Software-as-a-Service, Enterprise Systems & Network Management, Intelligence Software, and Solar Technology industries.  

The biggest challenges to January hiring was candidates receiving multiple offers. "We expect to see this trend continue," states Logan Knight, IT Recruiter at Redfish. "The pool of talented candidates is drying up with all the current growth, leading to good engineers getting multiple offers."   

Execunet reports that a recent survey found that recruiter expectations of job creation increased in at the end of 2012, recruiters indicated that they anticipate approximately one in five companies adding executive jobs in the next six months. Contingency search firm confidence reached 41 percent in December, its highest in eight months; retained recruiter confidence dropped to 31 percent, its lowest since the debt limit crisis in late summer of 2011.  

The Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report indicated that 157,000 were added in January, good but certainly not great. November and December were revised upwards by 156,000 collectively. Upward revision for the year shows an average of 181,000 jobs were created each month, and suggests that job growth has been more solid than previously thought.  

The industries leading the growth this month were the service-providing sector (+130,000), retail trade (+33,000), professional & business services (+25,000), health care (+23,000), goods-producing jobs (+36,000) and construction (+28,000).