Key Points
- Demand for nurses is cooling off slightly. As of May 5th, 2023, nursing job postings were down 2.1% from the same time last month.
- Salary transparency is on the rise. As of February 2023, 40.2% of nursing job postings featured a wage or salary provided by the employer, up substantially from 22.8% in February of 2022.
- As of March 2023, 15.8% of nursing job postings mentioned a signing bonus, down from 20% in the same month last year, but more than three times the average for all Indeed jobs mentioning a bonus.
Demand for nurses edges down
While overall job postings on Indeed declined for most of this year, nursing and other healthcare categories held up relatively well. As of May 5th, 2023, all job postings on the Indeed site were down 15.3% from the same time last year, while nursing job postings were down just 6.4%.
The chart below, showing month-over-month change in nursing job postings, gives a more detailed look at how this trend has changed in recent months. Nursing job postings declined month-over-month since mid-January 2023. As of May 5th, nursing job postings were down 2.1% from the same time last month, however, the month-over-month rate of decline has leveled off.
Despite this recent slowdown, demand for nurses remains elevated. Nursing job postings registered a 153 on the Indeed job postings index on May 5th, meaning there are still 53% more nursing job postings on the site compared to the pre-pandemic baseline of February 1, 2020.
Employers are more likely to show candidates the money
Recent research from the Indeed Hiring Lab found salary transparency in job postings has more than doubled since 2020, and in February 2023, 43.7% of job postings in the US featured an employer-provided wage or salary.
This increase in transparency reflects the competitive nature of the labor market for nurses, where in February 2023, 40.2% of job postings included a salary — up from 22.8% in February 2022.
The chart below shows how the increased emphasis on salary transparency looks across healthcare categories. Nursing job postings experienced one of the largest gains of any job category in the share of job postings that listed a salary.
While states and cities across the US have enacted salary transparency requirements, the dramatic rise in nursing job postings including salary information is further evidence employers are looking at ways to attract talent in a competitive field.
Signing bonuses are becoming less common
As employers struggled to find workers in the recovery from the pandemic, signing bonuses became more common in job postings. In recent months, however, their popularity has waned. But it should be noted that signing bonuses for nursing jobs in March 2023 are still more than three times higher than the average for all jobs on Indeed, reflecting the real challenge for employers to fill these positions.
The chart below shows the share of nursing job postings that list a signing bonus in the job description. As of March 2023, 15.8% mentioned a signing bonus, down from 20% in the same month last year. The high share of nursing postings with a signing bonus speaks to the relative difficulty in recruiting nurses, as only 4.9% of job postings for all jobs featured a bonus in the same month.
Conclusion
Aging demographics and shifting pandemic-related factors will likely keep demand for nurses relatively high, and recruiting competitive, for the foreseeable future. The growing emphasis on salary transparency and the elevated use of signing bonuses show a few of the ways employers are attracting talent in a notoriously difficult labor market.
Methodology
We calculate pay transparency share in US job postings by dividing the number of unique job postings with a salary into a total count of unique advertisements in a given month. Pay information is extracted from postings published on Indeed.com. Salaries advertised as being paid daily or weekly are omitted from the analysis.
Signing bonus job postings are defined as those that include terms like “signing bonus,” “sign-on bonus,” “signing incentive,” or “bonus for signing-on” in the job description.
Data on seasonally-adjusted Indeed job postings are an index of the number of seasonally-adjusted job postings on a given day, using a seven-day trailing average. February 1, 2020, is our pre-pandemic baseline, so the index is set to 100 on that day. We seasonally-adjust each series based on historical patterns in 2017, 2018, and 2019. We adopted this methodology in January 2021. Data for several dates in 2021 and 2022 are missing and were interpolated. Non-seasonally-adjusted data are calculated in a similar manner except that the data are not adjusted to historical patterns.
The number of job postings on Indeed.com, whether related to paid or unpaid job solicitations, is not indicative of potential revenue or earnings of Indeed, which comprises a significant percentage of the HR Technology segment of its parent company, Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd. Job posting numbers are provided for information purposes only and should not be viewed as an indicator of performance of Indeed or Recruit. Please refer to the Recruit Holdings investor relations website and regulatory filings in Japan for more detailed information on revenue generation by Recruit’s HR Technology segment.
