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 in-house labor market economist, David Garrett. And joining us again is our friend Rucha Vankudre from Talent Neuron who are our amazing partners for end-to-end workforce transformation. Hello, both of you.
And for our listeners at Joveo, we publish interactive insights across all major occupations in the U.S. You can check that out on our website, joveo.com/interactive-insights. So folks, after a short delay due to another government shutdown, we finally received the jobs report for January, 2026. Headlines are positive, but it also contains several revisions going back more than a year. On the one hand,
Rucha Vankudre
Look!
Yazad Dalal
You have Moody’s chief credit officer who says, strong growth in January assuages some concerns around the softening labor market, supports the outlook for consumption. On the other hand, we have Morgan Stanley’s chief economist saying, the strong payrolls print in January may be somewhat exaggerated. So I think both of them are being a little bit nuanced. Overall, the jobs report tells us the economy is decidedly weaker than a year ago.
And in Joveo’s own data, we see two distinct markets. One we call the flood. And in the flood market, white collar remote roles are seeing applications explode by more than 9x in some cases. And the other market we see is the drought, where frontline licensed location dependent roles continue to have major supply constraints. You can’t make nurses, electricians, truckers materialize from thin air.
So there’s a lot of nuance in all of these numbers. So Rucha, I have a lot of questions. Let’s get started. First of all, what’s your perspective on this new jobs report?
Rucha Vankudre
So first I want to start with the bad news. As you mentioned, there were a bunch of revisions that came out. And so last month when I was here, we mentioned that there were approximately 584,000 jobs added last year, which would make it one of the weakest years in recent history. But once a year, the BLS actually goes back and they compare their data with state insurance tax records to make sure that their numbers are actually in line with what the data is showing aside from surveys.
And what we found out was that the actual number of jobs last year was just 184,000 jobs, which means that 2025 was significantly worse than we thought across the board. The good news, as you mentioned, is that the January jobs report shows that the labor market is still hanging in there. We added 130,000 jobs, which is more than most people were expecting and more than twice what we saw in November and December. These do continue to mainly be in healthcare and social assistance.
Although this month we did get a bump in construction as well. Encouragingly, unemployment fell slightly from 4.4 % to 4.3%. And while that’s not much of a change, it’s at least in the right direction. In particular, we saw that youth and black unemployment also fell more significantly down from the highs we were seeing last year. So I think, as you said, a very mixed report depending on which perspective you’re taking.
Yazad Dalal
Yeah, and sounds like there’s good news on one hand bad news on the other. Tough year for retail also professional services, manufacturing. David, what’s your perspective on this? What should our listeners be thinking about with respect to their own recruitment efforts?
David
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I’m not as optimistic about this report as I think I’ve seen a lot of other people be. I’m hesitant that this 130,000 job addition that we saw in January won’t also be revised down since we’ve seen this trend of continued downward revisions. And I think this most recent report really highlights how important health care and social assistance has become to holding job growth afloat over the past year or two.
According to the most recent data, healthcare, I think added like 391,000 jobs in 2025, but overall employment fell to, you know, get to that 184,000 job number and, you know, not to make an ouroboros of the podcast, I guess, but, uh, you know, the given that unemployment rate just remained low, uh, this really means that we are this structural segmentation of the labor market that we’ve seen, uh, is continuing and will likely continue into the future where you will continue to have these roles where you just see this massive influx of applications and sometimes more than recruiters can handle and others where they’re going to struggle to just get a handful of applicants.
Yazad Dalal
Well, I think there’s gonna be a lot of wait and see for a lot of folks. If you are a talent acquisition leader, talent traction leader, recruiter, and would like to learn more about our own data, you can check that out online. It’s a white paper called the Recruiting Benchmarks Report. You can find it at joveo.com/recruiting-benchmarks-report-2026, or just Google it, the joveo.com recruiting benchmarks report.
Thanks David and Rucha. Thanks to our listeners. Definitely download that report and we will see you again soon.
David
Take care.
Rucha Vankudre
Thanks.
