The US labor market has taken a massive hit from the coronavirus pandemic. As of May 15, job postings are growing 37% slower than this time last year. This blow is widespread, with only 2.7% of job titles on Indeed, weighted by their number of postings, growing faster than last year’s trend. Some titles have been hit much harder than others, yet a decline in job postings trend growth is an almost universal fact.
Some jobs are seeing growth
Some opportunities do exist in the current labor market. Grocery associate has seen the largest acceleration in postings compared to its 2019 trend. On the other end of the food services market, delivery driver job postings have also picked up in 2020.
It’s no surprise that grocery associates and delivery drivers are in-demand right now, but those job titles are the exception. In fact, as of May 15, about 97% of job titles on Indeed are growing slower in 2020 than they were in 2019. Among the biggest declines are jobs in sectors hit hardest by the coronavirus: hotel housekeeper in hospitality and sous chef in food services.
Even healthcare, tech hit hard
The decline in the trend in job postings has even been widespread within certain job sectors. Even in healthcare, only 0.6% of job titles have job postings growing above 2019’s trend.
Similarly, less than 1% of tech job titles have seen postings growing faster than last year’s trend.
Interestingly, the trends in all tech and healthcare jobs are stronger than the overall labor market despite having fewer job titles growing faster last year’s trend. Employers looking to hire these positions have pulled back on planned hiring, but demand hasn’t dried up as much as elsewhere in the labor market.
Conclusion
Very, very few job titles are holding up in this labor market. And the slowdown in job postings is not only far reaching, but also large. Job seekers have limited options if they need to quickly find a job.
Methodology
The share of job titles looks at all normalized job titles on Indeed. Each job title’s change in job postings trend is weighted by their 2019 job postings count. We looked at an unweighted measure and the levels and trends in the index are very similar.
To measure the trends in job postings, we calculated the 7-day moving average of the number of US job postings on Indeed. We index each day’s 7-day moving average to February of that year (Feb 1, 2020 = 100 for 2020 data, and so on), or another date if specified on the chart.
We report how the trend in job postings this year differs from last year, in order to focus on the recent changes in labor market conditions due to COVID-19. For example: if job postings increased 30% from February 1, 2019, to May 15, 2019, but only 20% from February 1, 2020, to May 15, 2020, then the index would have risen from 100 to 130 in 2019 and 100 to 120 in 2020. The year-to-date trend in job postings would therefore be down 7.7% on May 15 (120 is 7.7% below 130) in 2020 relative to 2019.
The lists of normalized job titles are restricted to job titles with an average daily postings count of at least 2,000 during January 2020. We established this threshold in order not to highlight small job titles that may be growing quickly, but aren’t a significant source of hiring opportunities.
The healthcare and tech job title universes are manually curated lists of normalized job titles created by Hiring Lab researchers.
Information based on publicly available information on the Indeed US website, limited to the United States, is not a projection of future events, and includes both paid and unpaid job solicitations.
