Jobs begin to pick up in automotive industry

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DETROIT — A year ago, the job market was so bad that David Prince, then a student at Western Michigan University, was laid off from an internship.

He didn’t think he’d get a job after graduation.

“I was stressed out about it. … I was not happy about graduating in December,” said Prince, a supply chain management major.

But by mid-March, Prince landed the job he wanted as
a buyer at auto supplier Freudenberg-NOK — an experience that
illustrates how the automotive job market is thawing.

After bouts with bankruptcy, and historically low
sales, automakers are ramping up production and working on new vehicles
again. That’s leading to new hourly work at Magna and Lear, as well as engineering jobs at Ford and General Motors.

The new work won’t fix unemployment anytime soon.
But it is already helping to chip away at a sector’s need for jobs and
move the national economy in a positive direction.

“I had to hire more recruiters,” said Adam Conrad, director of recruiting at Troy, Mich.-based Resource, which fills engineering and IT positions. “When we start hiring, that means other people are hiring.”

Though employers are moving cautiously, the trend is
expected to continue throughout the year as consumers buy more new cars
and trucks.

U.S. auto sales through March are already up 15.5
percent compared with last year, leading automakers to plan to build
more. Light-vehicle production — a key driver for employment in the
auto sector — is expected to rise 34 percent this year.

“The best aspect of this rebound that we’re seeing
is that it is stable,” said Michael Robinet, vice president of global
vehicle forecasting for CSM Worldwide.

CSM expects production to gradually increase in 2011 and 2012.

As auto suppliers realize that higher volumes are not an aberration, they are more apt to hire.

“We think in many respects, a lot of suppliers are at that decision point right now,” Robinet said.

Magna International is hiring 400 people for a new plant in Highland Park, Mich., where it will make seats for General Motors and Chrysler vehicles.

Lear is taking applications to fill 285 jobs at its plant in Hammond, Ind., where it will make seats for the redesigned Ford Explorer.

Ford and GM are hiring in their salaried ranks and have recalled hourly workers at some of their plants.

Urban Science is hiring for 11 jobs at its Detroit headquarters and expects to be hiring steadily in the future.

A Raymond, a France-based maker of automotive fasteners with operations in Rochester Hills, said it has been filling as many as 100 jobs in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan and Ontario.

“We’re finding a need to fill a lot of those spots that we had to eliminate before,” said David Nenno, CEO of A Raymond Corporate North America. “With things picking up, we’re filling the payrolls back up again.”

Even with a boost in sales, automotive companies aren’t opening their doors to a flood of new hires.

Metal castings maker Grede Holdings, which recently merged with Novi, Mich.-based
Citation, has hired about 300 people since December. But it remains
tentative, concerned about another downturn in the economy.

“It’s really a week-by-week situation,” said Doug Grimm, CEO of Novi-based Grede Holdings. “Between November 2008 and July 2009, every week got worse. Since October 2009 to today, excluding Christmas, every week has gotten a little better.”

The pool of applications can be enormous for open jobs in this economy. Michigan’s unemployment rate was 14.1 percent in February, a slight improvement over January.

Michigan Works stopped taking applications for jobs at the new Magna plant after 1,600 people applied for 280 unfilled positions there, said Gregory Pitoniak, CEO of Southeast Michigan Community Alliance division of Michigan Works.

Still, Pitoniak said, job opportunities are on the rise.

“More and more employers are making the commitment to hire,” he said.

While the pool of job seekers is big, the number of
qualified candidates may be only a few. As more jobs open up, some
recruiters find they have competition for the right candidate.

Matt Bejin, North American recruiting manager for Urban Science, now moves more quickly to hire qualified candidates.

“We’re seeing candidates find other opportunities where we didn’t move fast enough. And we lost them,” Bejin said.

Urban Science hired only 33 people in Detroit last year. In 2010, it already has hired more than 13 people.

SAE, which hosts an annual engineering job fair in Detroit, expects 17 employers to participate this year.

That’s up from the 12 employers that showed up last year and met more than 1,000 job candidates.

This year, expect to see GM, Chrysler, Volvo, Hyundai, Kia and Navistar at SAE’s job fair April 13 and 14, said Martha Schanno, recruitment sales manager at the Society of Automotive Engineers.

“It’s … a sign of a comeback,” Schanno said.

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