We will be regularly updating this data as we track how coronavirus impacts the global labor market. 

The global economy has slowed dramatically during the coronavirus pandemic. The trend in job postings — a real-time measure of labor market activity — is 18% lower than in 2019, as of July 31. 

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The trend in job postings was roughly in line with last year’s trend until the second week of March. Postings were growing 2.9% slower than the trend in 2019 on March 15. The slowdown accelerated in the second half of March and through April to a low point of 39.3% on May 1, with gradual improvement since then.

Where job postings have declined most

Within the US, the trend in job postings is down most in metro Honolulu, San Francisco, and San Jose. 

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Job postings fell more initially in travel and tourism destinations, large and small, but postings have picked up since May 1 in hospitality metros like Las Vegas, Miami, and Orlando. Job postings have rebounded much more slowly in metros where more of the jobs can be done from home. In work-from-home metros, postings in retail, restaurant, and personal-services jobs have suffered. 

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Even more dramatic is the gap between larger and smaller metros. As of July 31, job postings in the largest metros are still 28% below last year’s trend, versus just 8% for the smallest markets. Government data confirm that this is a big-city recession. The largest metros have had the steepest rise in unemployment and the biggest job losses. This is yet another way that this crisis is different — in the Great Recession bigger metros held up better than smaller places did. 

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Job postings in red and blue metros

Larger metros tend to vote Democratic, as do tech hubs and other metros where more people can work from home. An implication of the geographic differences shown above is that job postings have rebounded much more in Republican-leaning markets. Postings are down 25% in blue metros but down only 11% in red metros. On this, the virus and the economy are taking different paths. The jobs-posting rebound has been stronger in red America, even though the June & July surge in COVID19 cases — unlike the April surge — has been more severe in red places.

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We’ll be regularly updating this data. We also host the data behind the postings trends plots on Github as downloadable CSV files. Typically, it will be updated with the latest data one day after the respective Hiring Lab tracker is published.

Note

We’re doing some clean-up on our occupational definitions and aren’t reporting trends by sector or wage tier this week. But they’ll be back soon!

Methodology

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 the start 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 for a country increased 30% from February 1, 2019, to May 22, 2019, but only 20% from February 1, 2020, to May 22, 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 22 (120 is 7.7% below 130) in 2020 relative to 2019. 

In the tables for this post, the caption “change in trend in postings” represents the percent change in job growth rate from February 1 compared to the same date the year prior. 

Information based on publicly available information on the Indeed US website (and any other countries named in the post), limited to the United States, is not a projection of future events, and includes both paid and unpaid job solicitations.