December's hiring slows 7%, but recreation and travel stay strong
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December's hiring slows 7%, but recreation and travel stay strong

Who’s still hiring? Check out December’s job fairs across the United States, and you’ll see many pockets of demand. In Florida, Disney has been hunting for cooks and housekeepers. Other parts of the country have been wanting school custodians, electricians and even detention center workers.  

If we look at the entire U.S. economy, however, hiring momentum may be cooling a bit. That’s the finding of LinkedIn’s latest Hiring Report, which tracks the velocity of LinkedIn members updating their profiles with new jobs each month.

Overall hiring declined 7% in December, and it’s “been zigzagging up and down since the spring, with no clear trend,” observes LinkedIn’s principal economist, Guy Berger Ph. D. For all of 2021, the LinkedIn Hiring rate rose 14.6%. But the vast majority of that gain occurred in the year’s first three months.

On an industry-by-industry basis, as seen in the chart below, most major sectors of the economy showed moderate hiring slowdowns in December. Of the 24 industries tracked by this analysis, only four posted an upturn. They are arts (+1.5%), recreation and travel (+0.7%), retail (+0.4%), and finance (+0.2%).  

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Meanwhile, most industries have seen hiring tail off in December, after a strong showing earlier in the year. These include transportation and logistics (-9.7%), healthcare (-7.4%), software and information technology services (-6.5%), and education (-2.5%).

December’s hiring slippage coincided with a flurry of concern about COVID’s omicron variant, which has been spreading rapidly. Diagnoses of new COVID cases in the U.S. surged to more than 250,000 a day by the end of December, more than triple the level of late October. 

During the first 18 months of the pandemic, employers – and regulators – were very much inclined to constrict social mingling and economic activity whenever COVID’s incidence flared up. Now, however, it’s hard to say whether that linkage still holds.

Clearly, the new omicron variant is storming through the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that omicron now accounts for 59% of the COVID cases that have been genetically sequenced lately, up from essentially zero.

Even so, early indications are that omicron’s impact is milder than earlier variants, as measured by deaths and hospitalizations. That reduced impact – plus general civic exhaustion with quarantines and lockdowns – may mean that employers largely press on with business as usual.

Strikingly, the recreation and travel industry – which was hammered by COVID-related restrictions in 2020 – isn’t showing signs of a hiring slowdown. As noted already, its hiring rate actually increased 0.7% in December. Some New York restaurateurs have closed temporarily in the face of omicron, but in many parts of the country, the industry mood remains cheery.

Major recreation and travel employers with plenty of job openings listed on LinkedIn include the Hilton hotel chain (4,117 jobs), the Enterprise car-rental business (2,595 jobs) and the Darden restaurant group (13,465 jobs). (Darden’s brands include Olive Tree, Longhorn Steak House and Eddie V’s.)

Looking at the 24 largest U.S. metro areas, December’s hiring data reveals some surprising findings about different places’ economic trajectories since the March 2020 start of the COVID pandemic.

Cleveland (+10.6%) shows the biggest improvement in its hiring rate, narrowly ahead of Austin (+10.5%). The two cities began at very different starting points, with the Texas state capital having a much more rapid hiring tempo than its older, Ohio counterpart. That gap still exists, but Cleveland has narrowed it a little. 

Denver (+9.1%), Atlanta (+8.6%) and Boston (+7.9%) also posted top-five results in terms of the pick-up in their hiring rates since the start of COVID. By contrast, San Francisco (-5.2%), Washington, D.C. (-2.7%) and Minneapolis (-1.1%) are the three metro areas where the hiring rate remains below its pre-COVID levels.

Methodology

The LinkedIn Hiring Rate (LHR) is the percentage of LinkedIn members who added a new employer to their profile in the same month the new job began, divided by the total number of LinkedIn members in that country. By only analyzing the timeliest data, we can make month-to-month comparisons and account for any potential lags in members updating their profiles. Using the U.S. Census Bureau's method to calculate seasonal adjustment, we remove predictable seasonal hiring variations to allow for easier comparison between months and analysis of emerging hiring trends.

LinkedIn data scientists Brian Xu and Guy Berger contributed to this article.


Jerad Kemper

Florida Gas Transmission/Energy Transfer

2y

Surely it's not because inflation is skyrocketing. Lets Go Brandon!!!!

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Damighir Adams

Chef at Hilton Hotels Worldwide

2y

Love this

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Brian "Doc" Burry

NorthStar Properties Inc - Realtor, US Army Combat Veteran

2y

Realistically? people are finally going back to work, after government intrusion because of Covid shutting down businesses. This is not from new jobs, it’s simply people returning to work! no more candy to hand out!

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