Yazad Dalal
Hi everyone, I’m Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer here at Joveo and welcome to Recruiting Realities, where we bring to you the latest developments and insights in recruitment. Today we’re speaking about the state of the labor market as usual with our own in-house labor market economist, David Garrett. And joining us again is our friend Rucha Vankudre from Talent Neuron, our amazing partner for end-to-end workforce transformation. Hello folks.

David
Howdy.

Yazad Dalal
And for our listeners at Joveo, we publish interactive insights across all major occupations in the US. You can check that out on our website Joveo.com/interactive-insights. So folks on Friday, the most recent US jobs report came out for the month of December. It seems like we’re getting back onto the regular schedule. No more, no more reports coming in from private employers, letting us know what they’re seeing and the jobs report tells us, I think, the economy is decidedly weaker than it was a year ago. Unemployment rate is 4.4%. It was 4.1 a year earlier. That’s still better than this past November. So it did improve. And that’s mostly because we saw government workers coming back to work after the shutdown. And of course, federal employment is still lower. It’s down almost 280,000 roles or jobs since January. So it’s a loss of
9.2 % federal jobs. And in payroll employment, we did see a rise. It’s up 50,000, which is a total gain for the year of just under 600,000 new jobs in 2025. So compare that to 2 million new jobs in 2024. So Rucha, I have a lot of questions. Let’s get started. What do you make of this news?

Rucha Vankudre
Thanks

So I think the most interesting thing here is really what you said last, which is that if we look at the year as a whole, we delivered so many fewer jobs than we did the year before that. And I want to say, obviously we’re still growing and that’s a good thing. Don’t want to say that’s not the case, but I think what’s really interesting is if you look at that specific number of what’s making up those jobs we added, this is not something that’s been spread across the economy.

really the job growth we’re seeing is due almost entirely to healthcare and social assistance. And without those jobs, we would be seeing a loss. So if we look at combined healthcare and social assistance, they added approximately 713,000 jobs in 2025, which basically, you know, more than makes up for that 500,000 net number we’re seeing. And so what that means is that every other major employment sector contracted or stagnated. And I think there’s…

Some people are saying, well, it’s just the government. But if you look at those numbers, it’s not, right? It’s really across the board. So retail shed 25,000 jobs, business and professional services lost approximately $100,000, sorry, 100,000 jobs over the full year and manufacturing lost almost 68,000. So this really is, I would say a definite slowdown of what we’ve been seeing prior.

Yazad Dalal
And a tough year for retail, professional services and manufacturing. David, how does this compare to Joveo’s own data?

I mean, yeah, a lot of it matches up very well. Now, the majority of job posting activity we’ve seen has been in healthcare, which has really just remained high since 2020. We’ve seen a slowdown in sort of those more corporate roles like marketing, HR, data analytics, things like that. You know, in December, we saw many occupations show lower posting volumes compared to earlier peaks, which is very in trend with what you see for seasonal slowdown. A lot of people are either filling early 2026 rolls or backfilling. But what we didn’t see is the drop in sort of the cost people were having to pay for this. You would expect as demand slows down, does the cost per click, so does the cost per apply. But although December was quieter overall in terms of jobs, the cost and competition to reach candidates didn’t reset when the calendar did.

So really between the BLS report and our own data, you can see that December looked quieter but wasn’t easier in terms of the costs, the impact geography has in the labor demand and labor supply on outcomes and the sort of structural shortages we continue to see that are visible beneath the seasonal slowdown that happens at the end of the year.

Yazad Dalal
Gotcha. Well, hopefully in a new year, we’ll see some nice green shoots in the employment outlook for all of us, our families, our friends, both in the US and around the world. David and Rucha, I wish you both a very happy new year and to our listeners as well. And please don’t forget to visit us at Joveo.com. We’ll see you again soon.

Rucha Vankudre
Thank you.

David
Take care.