Boise market of well-paid jobs aided by housing trends

The U.S. housing slowdown isn’t entirely bad news if you’re looking for a well-paying job in the Boise area, as Rich Davila sees it.

His company, Professional Career Solutions, helps people find higher-paying jobs, which traditionally lag behind the supply of qualified people to fill them. That task is a bit easier now that fewer people are cashing in homes in other U.S. cities and adding to Boise’s “supply belt” of highly paid people looking for jobs, he said.

Davila views the job market as a triangle. A horizontal line in the middle marks the supply belt, where the most people are unemployed.

“Boise is the third-fastest-growing city in the U.S., and 75 to 85 percent (of people) who move to Boise will come here unemployed,” he said. Most previously held jobs that paid in the high $70,000s annually, he said.

“The supply belt has more people than positions, so competition for those jobs is fierce,” Davila said. Prospects for the person seeking a job at this level are strongest from January until early March, after employers set their personnel budgets, he said.

“Positions are steadily increasing at a normal rate,” Davila said of the supply segment of the Boise job market. “We’re not getting as many people moving here, so there are not as many unemployed people moving here as in the past mainly because of the real estate market crash in other places.”
This slower in-migration of unemployed people, seeking jobs paying in the mid-$30,000s to low $100,000s a year, bodes well for pay increases at those jobs, he said. The jobs remain available, as Boise’s economy keeps growing, he said.
However, Boise’s growth remains based on quality of life more than industry, said Davila, who worked in career counseling in Phoenix before buying Professional Career Solutions about three years ago. Many people continue to move to Boise for the lifestyle even if it means they stay unemployed or under-employed for a while, he said.
Initially, they contribute to growth of the “demand belt” – the lower-paying bottom of the job-market triangle, where jobs outnumber candidates and where pay is lowest – as they spend money in the service sector or even start businesses that employ lower-paid staff, he said.
Many of the in-migrants start businesses because they can’t find the right job soon enough, Davila said. This is one reason that Boise has a strong small and mid-sized business sector that can produce well-paid jobs eventually, he said.
“I’m seeing the professional-level positions starting to grow,” Davila said. “The higher tier is starting to grow and expand. For example, the small businesses are starting to grow and to hire people.”
About 44 percent of jobs at middle to upper pay levels are “spot opportunities” that aren’t necessarily available when a candidate is looking for a job, he said.
Valley Initiative for Prosperity aims to bring more high-paying jobs to the Boise area. The Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce and a number of major businesses raised money for the initiative, which Davila said will benefit the supply area of the job market.
Consumer spending has started to drop, Davila said. He hasn’t yet seen an impact on employment, a lagging economic indicator, he said.
The number of jobs in the lower-paid demand belt continues to rise, Davila said. “Staffing companies are getting many orders a day. The challenge is recruiting enough people to fill the orders.”
At the top of Davila’s market triangle, the “specific” belt has the fewest positions and the smallest number of people who meet the high qualifications and salary level. A chief executive is at the top, with the highest pay and the longest, steepest climb. Upper-level managers also fill this segment.
“It has not grown exponentially,” Davila said of the specific category. “The majority (of positions) are not filled with our labor pool. They are either entrepreneurs who have grown to that level or are companies that are usually not trying to find someone in our market to fill that position.”
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To contact the author of this story, e-mail brad.carlson@idahobusiness.net