Bay Area CEOs Don't Feel Like Hiring

If you and yours can't find jobs, it's not your fault. Not entirely, anyway -- busines leaders just aren't in a hiring mood.

The Bay Area Council, a coterie of the region's biggest businesses -- and, ergo, biggest employers -- issued a report this week in which the council's CEOs expressed "strong disappointment with the pace of [the nation's economic] recovery over the past six months," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. They're not the only ones to be disappointed, either -- eager job-seekers as well as the employed alike will soon have their souls quashed, too.

Leaders' lack of faith in profit margins will mean less jobs for the Bay Area in the immediate term: a good 20 percent of business leaders surveyed in the Council's report say that they're looking at layoffs. Sixty percent of the executives in the report said that their workforces will stay the same over the next six months, with "just 21 percent" of companies looking to add staff, according to the newspaper.

Rising health-care costs were identified as the chief culprit for business leaders' lack of hiring fervor. Public sector employers are the most in trouble, with private businesses in Contra Costa and Alameda counties the least-excited about the country's recovery, according to the report.