Lucas County hiring picks up

Initial jobless claims in Lucas County are trending down, and a range of local employers have been hiring.

Mercy, for example, has hired 280 employees in four months for its four Toledo area hospitals and Mercy College of Northwest Ohio.

ProMedica Health System has been hiring about 100 people a month throughout its network, including hospitals in southeast Michigan, Defiance, and Fostoria.

Most of those ProMedica hires were within the Toledo area, and the company has at least another 400 job openings, said Wendy Papenfuss, ProMedica's human resources director of work-force planning.

"As a health-care system, we have quite a few openings," she said. "It's just some of these are highly skilled and hard to fill."

Nationwide, advertised job openings rose by 6.2 percent to 3.04 million in July after two months of decline, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Labor Department.

Total U.S. openings, however, remain below the 4.4 million that existed when the recession began in December, 2007.

The Lucas County jobless rate was 12.1 percent in July (the latest month available) and the metro Toledo rate was 11.5 percent in July.

In Lucas County, new jobless claims in August averaged 746, down from 840 in the same four-week period in 2009, one report shows.

Ohio's new jobless claims, meanwhile, fell by 1,649 in the week ending Aug. 28, while Michigan's declined by 1,559. Numbers for last week will be reported today by the Labor Department.

Both Mercy and ProMedica accept job applications on their Web sites, and they both were represented in late April at Project HIRE 2010, an annual job fair sponsored by The Source of Northwest Ohio, The Blade, and other organizations.

Numerous other healthcare-related employers also were at the April 30 job fair held at the Lucas County Recreation Center.

Anne Grady Corp., which cares primarily for adults with mental retardation, has hired 75 people since the job fair, said Velma Thomas, human resources manager.

"We did look at a very high number of people from the fair," she said.

Many of those hired by Anne Grady provide direct patient care, such as bathing and feeding, Ms. Thomas said.

Anne Grady has more such positions open, especially for those willing to work part time for 20 to 30 hours a week, she said.

Among other participants at the job fair:

•FirstEnergy Corp. filled five of seven job openings since May at its Bay Shore power plant, but the other two will remain vacant. The company also hired 12 people at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant this year, and it is in the process of filling 26 more positions.

•The Ohio Department of Transportation's office for eight northwest Ohio counties has, since May, hired or is in the process of hiring 11 people.

•Lourdes College, which attended the fair to discuss career options with job seekers, has hired 25 employees this year: 10 faculty and 15 staff.

Contact Julie M. McKinnon at:

jmckinnon@theblade.com

or 419-724-6087.