Kaben Clauson, poses for a photo at his TruePublic office in Chicago April 4. Small business owners like Clauson are wary as they see signs of a weaker economy have been scaling back hiring in recent months and finding ways to get work done without new employees. Clauson had planned on taking on full-time staffers, but partly because of the economy decided against the added risk. | AP NEW YORK – Samantha Martin does most of the annual hiring for her public relations firm in the first quarter. But not this year — clients worried about a slowing economy are cutting their budgets, and Martin has in turn scaled back her own plans. “Our clients are having trouble getting funding and therefore public relations and marketing are the first to get cut,” says Martin, owner of New York-based Media Maison. If Martin’s firm has more work than her current staff can handle, she’ll hire freelancers who work by the hour. Hiring on a project-by-project basis removes the potential of having to lay anyone off. Small business owners who are uneasy as they see signs of a weakening economy have cut back on hiring in recent months and found ways to get work done without adding employees. The latest evidence of a hiring slowdown came last week, when payroll provider ADP said its small business customers created just 6,000 jobs in March. February’s tally of 19,000 new jobs was also weak and down sharply from January’s 98,000; ADP’s small business numbers also fluctuated throughout 2018. The report, as well as the most recent jobs report from the Labor Department, clearly shows that small business hiring has lagged behind job creation at larger companies. Small business owners, especially those who learned hard lessons from the Great Recession about overstaffing, are playing it safe. While a Capital One survey also released last week showed that 29 percent of 500 small business owners planned to hire in the next six months, that was down from 33 percent in a survey six months earlier. Of the owners who don’t plan to hire, nearly 30 percent said the economy is making them too nervous to spend more on staffing. The Capital One survey was in line with other surveys taken during the first quarter. The economy is widely expected to slow this year, starting with the recently ended first quarter. Economists surveyed by financial information provider FactSet estimate that gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 1.6 percent from January through March, down from 2.9 percent in all of 2018. TruePublic’s last four hires were part-timers. CEO Kaben Clauson had planned on taking on full-time staffers, but partly because of the economy decided against the added risk. “We could hire those people full time now — we have the money to do so — but it would give us only six months of a cash cushion,” says Kaben, whose Chicago-based company conducts online surveys. “We’d feel more comfortable with a year’s cushion.” Clauson’s […]
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