Recruiters Say They’re Hiring, But UCSD Engineering Students See It Differently

California’s jobless data for January is set for release Friday, but there’s little reason to expect much improvement since December, when the statewide unemployment rate hit 9.3 percent, with more than 1.73 million California residents out of work. In San Diego County, overall unemployment was at 7.4 percent in December, with 117,000 people jobless.

For the tech sector job market specifically, Xconomy’s layoff trackers offer another barometer of a generally grim situation (You can find our San Diego layoff tracker here). Greg and Wade provided another perspective last month by talking to some of the MBA students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, MA, during their annual “tech trek” to meet with companies in Silicon Valley, as well as Seattle and Boston.

But I sensed more anxiety—or maybe it was less confidence—when I dropped in at UC San Diego Friday for an annual job fair organized by students at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

“Everyone’s worried about the economy,” says Dat Kieu, a third-year undergraduate studying mechanical engineering. He was looking for an internship or part-time job.

UCSD says its Disciplines of Engineering Career Fair (DECaF) is the only annual, student-managed, multidisciplinary career fair on campus. and this year 71 companies participated. A public relations coordinator, eager to convey the idea that companies are hiring, even provided a survey (with 30 of the 71 companies responding) that shows 40 percent of the companies attending the fair say they plan to hire the same number of full-time positions in 2009 as they hired in 2008—although 33 percent say they plan to hire fewer entry-level engineers. The same survey shows 53 percent expect to place the same number of engineering interns this year, with 23 percent planning to recruit fewer interns in 2009.

“It’s an interesting hiring climate,” says Qualcomm recruiter Vince Walker. “We’re not going full throttle, but we’re still bringing people on board.” Yet Walker and other recruiters told me the tough job market enables them to be far more selective.

Bob Balderas, a recruiter for New Jersey-based BD Biosciences, which employs about 400 in San Diego, says the company plans to start

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.