February 12, 2010

 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will issue its monthly employment situation report Friday, and the best guess now is that there’ll be more job losses. 

But the “headline” payroll number, specifically the month-over-month change, will be only part of the story, said Mark Lieberman senior economist for the Fox Business Network and former first vice president and manager of economic analysis and research at Washington Mutual in New York.

“The largest impact on the numbers will be from an annual benchmark change to payroll data. Here’s how it works and why it is likely to show a huge increase in the number of jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007,” Lieberman said.

Briefly put, as Lieberman explained it, each month the BLS surveys some 165,000 employers at about 400,000 locations to learn the number of payroll employees for the week including the 12th calendar day of the month. Every fall, BLS offers an estimate of what the revision will be before actually applying it with the report issued the following February. 

Now, Last October, Lieberman said, “BLS estimated the revision would show payrolls were over-counted by about 824,000 for the period from April 2008 through March 2009, which means, if unchanged, that through December recession job losses exceeded 8 million, not the 7.2 million reported.”

This sort of economy is an opportunity for workforce optimization vendors. In fact, in November Gartner (News - Alert) selected NICE Systems for its leader quadrant in its workforce optimization report. At the same time, the company announced its financial results for the third quarter. 

The company reported non-GAAP net income of $24 million, down 10 percent year-over-year from $26.7 million in the third quarter 2008. Sequentially, however, NICE’s third quarter net income was up from $22.1 million.

“Overall, we need to take [the results] as part of the global environment,” said Dafna Gruber, corporate vice president and chief financial officer with NICE Systems (News - Alert). “We had a good quarter because our ability to accumulate the booking was high and were much higher in revenues.”

Earlier this month NICE Systems, which sells products that lets enterprises and security organizations “extract insight from interactions,” according to company officials, and AnswerOn, which sells customer retention, acquisition and loyalty products to telecommunications service providers, have announced that Cincinnati Bell (News - Alert) selected the joint NICE-AnswerOn Customer Churn Reduction product.