President Barack Obama urged businesses to “step up” and hire workers, pressing banks and other corporations to do more to help an economy that he said would take “several years” to recover fully, Reuters reported.

In a town-hall-style meeting conducted by CBS News on Wednesday, the president said the weak housing market and high gasoline prices were the biggest “headwinds” dragging on the economy.

“We’ve got a lot more work to do to get businesses to invest and to hire,” Obama told the audience in remarks broadcast today.

He said businesses and banks that reaped the rewards of extraordinary measures to pull the country out of a deep recession had a responsibility now to invest cash into U.S. jobs.

“It is time for companies to step up,” Obama said. “American taxpayers contributed to that process of stabilizing the economy. Companies have benefited from that, and they’re making a lot of money, and now’s the time for them to start betting on American workers and American products.”

U.S. companies created jobs at the fastest pace in five years in April, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, pointing to underlying strength in the economy even as the jobless rate hit 9 percent.