News and Finance

HOWARD WALL, director, Center for Regional Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Wall has a message for the gainfully employed who have managed to somehow remain in the same job over the past 2 1/2 years: You may now exhale.

"Companies will keep things as they are for awhile, waiting to see if they can expand," Wall says. "But the drastic cuts are probably over."

The re-entry of non-survivors into the work force, he adds, may require them to search for a job in venues where they may never have looked before.

"If we’re going to come out of it, it’s going to be the small businesses," said Wall. "People always look to land at big businesses, but retailers and small professional service firms is where the employment is going to be. That’s where the growth comes from and, if you look at St. Louis, that’s where we’ve faltered in the past."

CARLOS PEREA, chief human resources director for BJC HealthCare, the region’s largest employer with more than 27,000 workers

From a fifth-floor office on the edge of the Central West End, Perea’s vision of the short-term job outlook extends decidedly beyond the St. Louis neighborhood where BJC makes its headquarters.

"It’s going to depend on what happens in Greece, what happens in China, what happens in Portugal and what happens in Spain," said Perea, who has supervised hiring for the health care giant since 2006. "We’ve become such a global economy that the United States can no longer just go by itself."

Narrowing the focus closer to home, Perea is optimistic about the area economy’s ability to rebound from the recession.

But he is unsure how it will translate into jobs. He offers BJC as an example.

In 2007, the area’s top employer had a turnover rate of 20 percent. By 2009, turnover among BJC employees had dropped to 13 percent. And this year, Perea expects it to dip below that.

"Because of turnover, we’re going to hire 50 percent" fewer people than BJC did prior to the recession, said Perea. "And it has nothing to do with business conditions or volume or anything else. It’s just a function of not replacing the people we once had to replace."

Economists, the government and just about anyone with an opinion point to the health sector as a likely source of recession-proof jobs in the future.

Perea throws out a couple of caution flags, noting that most health care jobs now and in the future will be filled by individuals with clinical training in specific fields, such as radiology.

He further warns that health care is no less susceptible to market forces than any other field, and that the sector faces uncertainty given the changes that health care reform might bring cheap payday advance.

DON BARNES, president, PeaceFrog, a Ballwin web developer

By the fourth quarter of 2008, the business Barnes had started three years before was progressing just as he had hoped. The entrepreneur was looking at orders with the potential to add anywhere from $350,000 to $500,000 to his bottom line.

PeaceFrog also had started contributing value to the local economy with the addition of the firm’s first employee, a full-time office assistant.

Then, the bottom fell out of the economy and "everything came off the table."

Barnes was able to hire a successor after the first assistant departed. But in December, Barnes had to let the successor go.

"I couldn’t make payroll anymore," he says. "It was heartbreaking."

From his vantage point, Barnes agrees with the Federal Reserve’s Wall and other experts who maintain that small businesses will take the lead in area job recovery.

Many entrepreneurs, he points out, are emerging from the recession having barely escaped insolvency.

As they begin to hire again, Barnes says, small-business owners will do so carefully. Very carefully.

He therefore advises candidates pursuing positions in that sector to keep one important factor in mind:

"That whole ‘Give me a job thing’ just doesn’t work anymore. … Especially in this market, you have to differentiate yourself. You have to separate yourself from the pile of r