Pasadena, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/28/2010 -- The unemployment rate in the metro Atlanta area went up to 9.9% in May. Over 262,000 people are unemployed in the region and that number is unlikely to go down soon unless small businesses start hiring according to the state’s Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond.

The Atlanta region has been affected in the same way as the rest of the country, with experts predicting that most of the jobs lost, for example in manufacturing and information technology, are most probably not going to come back.

But AtlantaMetroCrossing CEO, A. Harrison Barnes, says the Atlanta job market still has several openings. The company runs a niche job site focusing on only on the jobs available in the Atlanta metro area. “For the Atlanta metro area alone we have been able to compile almost 29,000 jobs, and in the last seven days almost 7,000 jobs.” And these jobs are not just in retail but also in the skilled sectors such as information technology, physical therapy, engineering and other hi-tech well-paying fields.

The reason Barnes’s company has been able to list so many jobs is that the company keeps researching not just job boards but employer sites as well for any openings and has aggregated them in a single database. The site has 6,061 jobs listed in information technology sector, 3,974 jobs in accounting, finance and insurance sectors, 1,823 jobs in engineering, 8,252 jobs in management and business and 582 jobs that pay over 100K.