Introduction

Welcome to Recruiting Realities, your go-to spot for all things hiring! This time around, we’re tearing into the December 2024 US jobs report. We’ll be cheering on those record-breaking job numbers and figuring out which industries are totally crushing it. Get ready to dive into the data with us!

Yazad Dalal: Hi everyone! I’m Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer here at Joveo, and welcome to Recruiting Realities, where we bring you the latest developments and insights in recruitment. Today we’re speaking again with our in-house labor market economist, David Garrett, about the US jobs report for December 2024. Hey David! 

David Garrett: Hey, how’s it going? How are you?

Yazad Dalal: Awesome. 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

David, the most recent US jobs report came out for the month of December. I think the US labor market added over 256,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.1% from 4.2% in November. That’s 2.2 million jobs added over the course of 2024. I think it also caps four straight years of job growth. I think that’s a record, too. But I also saw that the job gains were somewhat lopsided. I think the lion’s share, about 75% of the job gains in 2024 were again, as usual, in healthcare, government, and specifically in local government, leisure and hospitality, all of which are industries that I think are continuing to play catch up from the pandemic. And in Joveo’s own data, we see nurses and construction workers are still the hardest to fill roles in 40 out of the 50 states. And within healthcare, we continue to see heavy demand for travel nurses, in particular. There’s nearly 50,000 open positions last month on the Joveo platform. So David, I have lots of questions. Let’s get started. First of all, what were some of your key takeaways from this latest report?

David Garrett: Yeah, I mean, honestly, this was kind of expected to be a positive report. Most were expecting not as many jobs as we saw gained, but a positive number either way. Like, as you mentioned, net payrolls increased, which I think also puts the US total payrolls at a record high of 159.5 million jobs. You know, unemployment fell by around 235,000 total, bringing the total unemployment rate down. And I think also both initial and continuing jobless claims have remained low.

A big portion of this is related to the post-hurricane recovery. We’ve continued to see the usual suspects, as you mentioned, of government and healthcare, accounting for the largest gains. Retail’s jump is very seasonal, due to holidays. So our listeners’ mileage may vary as to how they want to interpret these results and what they mean for their specific industry. 

And, you know, we also might continue seeing disruptions in the labor market as we move forward because of other natural disasters that are occurring, such as these wildfires in California that have been terrible. And also there’s some back-to-back winter storms we’re experiencing. So, leading into January, we might have some interesting results.

Yazad Dalal: And I think that makes sense. Post hurricanes we saw a dip. Some of the December gains are still coming from that rebound. So, I’m sure the awful fires in California are going to have a similar impact. Okay, so tell us overall, how did 2024 shape up, compared to 2023?

David Garrett: Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite things about the December report is they started doing a lot more commentary about how the year shaped out and, you know, it allows us to make it a little easier to draw comparisons to last year. Main call outs I noticed were that the monthly average job gains for the year ended up at, I think, around 186,000 which is below the insanely high recovery rates we saw from 2021 to 2023.

But definitely a return to normalcy when you look at the average for monthly hiring between 2010 and 2019. This is a lot more stable than the crazy high rate we were moving at. But, although, to balance things out, one thing that wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the report, but I think is important, is that there were around 760,000 layoffs and job cuts in 2024. These were largely widespread across industries, but mainly concentrated in white collar and tech work. And I think that’s the second highest number of cuts since 2010. You know, this is also why since this time last year, the unemployment rate has increased by I think 0.5% to 0.6%, which is, you know, it can, if it keeps going up, it’ll be concerning.

Yazad Dalal: Got it. Well, thank you, David, and thank you to our listeners. Don’t forget to visit us at joveo.com and we’ll see you again soon!

David Garrett: Yeah, take care.

Conclusion

This episode wrapped up with the big reveal: we’re seeing more stable job growth compared to the post-pandemic boom, though ongoing layoffs in tech and white-collar gigs are still making things a bit tricky for the overall job market. As we head into the new year, make sure to keep up with our monthly insights that can be found here!