Jacksonville Job Market

Convergys to Hire 400 in Jacksonville

Cincinnati, OH company, Convergys, has announced in a press release that they will be offering 400 new jobs in the Jacksonville contact center. This comes shortly after Belgian company Delhaize closed down all of its Jacksonville-area Food Lion grocery stores, putting 700 people out of work. The jobs offered by Convergys will be for seasonal and nonseasonal work in customer service and sales positions. According to the press release, the seasonal jobs will be for a lawn car company and the non seasonal jobs will be for a telecommunications company. Read more about Convergys to Hire 400 in Jacksonville

Food Lion Closing in Jacksonville and Cutting Jobs

The Jacksonville job market is about to be flooded with an army of workers who have experience working in grocery stores. Food Lion is closing down its operations in the Jacksonville area along with the rest of Florida, and one of the unfortunate side effects is that it there will be a considerable number of people joining the ranks of the unemployed. 20 stores will be closed, with the number of employees at each store averaging out at about 35 employees. There will be 12 stores closed in the metro area and eight more in surrounding areas.

Two Growing Companies Bring 69 Jobs to Jacksonville

Embraer S.A. and The Foundation Financial Group

50 jobs with Embraer S.A.

One of the more hopeful items in the news for Jacksonville recently was the investment in the city made by Embraer S.A. . Mayor Alvin brown worked hard to get these investors to come to town. The company is presently the fourth largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. They are Brazilian, and began operation in August 1969 with help from the Brazilian government. Back then, they were given the contract to create a fighter plane for the Brazilian air force. They started out by making the EMB 326 Xavante a fighter jet. In the 1970s they expanded from producing only military airplanes into the manufacture of aircraft for the commercial market.

The new contract with the Defense department is worth $355 million. The company’s facilities in Jacksonville are located at the Jacksonville International Airport. The 50 jobs the contract provides to the area will be at the facility and will require highly technical skills. Read more about Two Growing Companies Bring 69 Jobs to Jacksonville

End of Year Job Openings in Jacksonville

The Improving Jacksonville Job Picture

Much like in the rest of Florida, the job picture in Jacksonville appears to be improving, albeit slowly. The unemployment rate in November slipped down to 9.4 percent which marks the fourth consecutive month that it has done so. Adjust it seasonally and the rate is 10 percent down from 10.4.

Using Employflorida to find work in Jacksonville

This website is one of the major state-funded resources for finding work in Florida. While it has a long way to go when it comes to user-friendliness and ease of applying for jobs, it has been worse. The site underwent a minor facelift earlier this year and became a little more up to date. Up until that point it had been a throwback to the year 2000, with clunky, inefficient methods of doing everything while handling slowly. It still makes applying for a job far more complicated than necessary when compared to a site like Monster.com.

The key to working with Employflorida is to set aside about two hours if this is your first time. The rewards may be worth it.

Forbes Ranks Jacksonville 6th for Tech Jobs Nationwide

One of the more positive notes struck in regard to employment in Jacksonville is the ranking given to Jacksonville by Forbes Magazine on its list of cities for tech jobs. Jacksonville was ranked at number 6, one of a select number of cities to make gains in the niche over the last decade. Forbes reported that the number of jobs went up 1.4 percent between 2009 and 2011. The jobs form part of an expected 2 percent increase in the city’s overall job growth in the next 12 months.

MGM Looking at Jacksonville for Possible Casino Location

MGM Resorts International owners of such world famous, iconic gambling and vacation properties as the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay and Mirage in Las Vegas, was recently in Jacksonville scouting properties for a possible hotel casino. Legislation currently underway in the Florida Senate would allow the building of limited gambling resorts potentially hiring hundreds of residents and injecting billions into the local economy.

Unemployment in Jacksonville, Especially Among Veterans

Scam Job Posts on the Jacksonville Craigslist

Craigslist.com’s employment section for Jacksonville is full of fake job ads placed there with the intention of getting an applicant to sign up for a service that pays the poster a commission or else gets them to submit personal information that can be sold or used for fraudulent purposes. In many cases the ads are so blatantly fake that it would be difficult to imagine anyone falling for them, and yet they must be successful to some extent for the number of false job ads to be worth the effort. Unfortunately, the Jacksonville jobs section is no different from the pages for other Major Florida cities. It has gotten to the point where the only way to tell a real ad is if the person posting actually lists the name of the business or a local phone number, which is sometimes inconvenient. It should be noted that in most cases the scammers are not even in this country, let alone in Florida. The ads are often worded in vague terms so that they can be submitted to the Craig’s List jobs sections of many cities without having to be altered each time.

This is all unfortunate since as few as 3 years ago, craigslist.com was an excellent resource for job hunters in Northeast Florida. It was possible to go to the Jax jobs section or Gainesville’s, or to Orlando’s and find several legitimate jobs each day depending on the niche in which you were searching, without having to wade through too much spam. These days, in much of Northeast Florida, if you find three genuine, local ads in a week you have to consider yourself fortunate. In fact, if there is no reason the believe that a job ad is legitimate, the safest bet is to presume that it is not rather than provide your name, email address and phone number to them.