After moving to Carson City from Santa Barbara, Calif., seven months ago to be closer to his son, Brian Johnson, 46, is now among the thousands of Nevadans looking for steady work.
Johnson said he initially took a job at a local dollar store with 20 hours of work each week. Now he's down to 12 hours, prompting a visit Tuesday to the JobConnect office, the state agency tasked with helping Nevadans find jobs.
"I don't know how I'm going to make it," Johnson said. "I mean, you put out applications everywhere and they don't even call you back. It's pretty shocking."
Johnson's search for work has become a common trend in Nevada unemployment offices.
From April to June this year, 44,722 people visited a Nevada JobConnect office in Carson City, Reno and Sparks combined, Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Mae Worthey said.
Meanwhile, the state's unemployment rate grew to a record 13.3 percent in September, up from 13.2 percent in August, according to a DETR report released Monday.
Nevada employers also added 11,000 new jobs last month, according to the report.
Elliott Parker, an economist at the University of Nevada, Reno, said the growth in the state's jobless rate could be a sign that more people are now looking for work, which could increase Nevada's unemployment figures as more people try to enter the workforce.
"More people are employed, but other people start to enter the workforce to start and look," Parker said. "That keeps the unemployment higher for a little while. That's a sign of a turnaround. Eventually those people enter the job
market."
Parker said many economists are predicting that the national unemployment rate, now at 9.8 percent, could continue growing for the next four to six months, but "that's a guess."
Still, with unemployment figures growing, Carson City residents on the job hunt say the search has grown more difficult.
When Dave Woods, 47, lost his job at the Carson City-based company Chromalloy in December, he said in January that it would give him a chance to relax and time to find a new job.
But 10 months later, Woods said he still is looking for a job and the prospects of finding one, he said, are dwindling.
"We've been looking; we can't find nothing to really pay anything," Woods said. "It's been almost a year now."
Woods said his unemployment benefits will last through the first of 2010, but after that he will have to expand his job search, potentially forcing him and his family to leave the state.
Timothy Helme, 26, was at the JobConnect office Tuesday looking for work. He's been out of a job for nearly three weeks and said he was denied unemployment benefits.
He had been working for a steel company as a metalworker until April when he lost his job amid medical leave. He took some work with a heating company until those hours went away last month.
Helme, who said he wants to stay in metal work, said he has sent out more than 100 applications to companies in Reno, Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, to no avail.
If he cannot find a job in the next few months, Helme said he may have to consider leaving Nevada.
"Anything, honestly," Helme said of his job search. "Anything I can get a paycheck from."