Introduction
Welcome to Recruiting Realities, your weekly dose of all things hiring! Today, we’ve got a full house with Joveo’s very own labor market guru, David Garrett, and our awesome pal, Dave Wilkins from TalentNeuron! We’re teaming up to spill the beans on the January 2025 US jobs report and give you the inside scoop on what’s cooking for the rest of the year. Get ready for some serious insights and maybe a few predictions that’ll make your jaw drop!
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 again with our own in-house labor market economist, David Garrett, and with our friend, Dave Wilkins, from our wonderful partners, TalentNeuron. TalentNeuron are the experts in strategic workforce planning, talent marketplace, and market intelligence solutions.
The three of us are going to be talking about the U.S. jobs report for January 2025, along with their insights and predictions into what we can expect in the rest of the year. And for our listeners at Joveo, we publish Interactive Insights across all major occupations across the U.S. You can check that out on our website, joveo.com/interactive-insights
So David Garrett, let’s get started. The most recent U.S. jobs report came out for the month of January. The U.S. labor market added an estimated 143,000 jobs, less than the 169,000 that we were expecting. And the unemployment rate dropped ever so slightly for the second month in a row to 4 % down from 4.1% in December. And I think importantly, the January report also had revisions to all the job data from March 2023 to March 2024, which completely changed the total number of jobs added for that period by like 600,000. So the size of the US population, the labor force, which had inflated the unemployment and labor force participation rate by 0.1%, which I know to our listeners may not sound like a lot, but that means that almost 3 million people went unaccounted for. So that’s interesting. And in Joveo’s own data, we continue to see significant increases in healthcare openings. And we see that the government, oddly, continues to hire despite everything we’re seeing in the news. So Dave, David, I have lots of questions. Let’s get started. David Garrett, first off for you, what are your key takeaways from this latest report?
David Garrett: Yeah, mean, even though job growth wasn’t as spectacular as I think many were hoping, it’s kind of a continuation of the previous trends we’ve seen throughout 2024. And the labor market has kind of just continued to stay resilient while continuing this sort of slowdown into a soft landing.
Healthcare, social assistance, and government employment, you know, kind of as you mentioned, continued trending upwards while others stayed relatively stable. You know, the only standout I could see was I believe retail, which had an estimated 34,000 job growth in January. You know, that’s a change from the very little net growth throughout all of 2024. It’ll be more interesting to see how these changes kind of, or how these trends change as we go on into the year and particularly into February.
Yazad Dalal: So what do you think we’re going to see in the February report and what do think we’re going to see across the rest of the year? Are there any insights or predictions you think our listeners should be paying attention to?
David Garrett: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s still too early to give any official estimates. And I think you see that pretty generally shared across most sources. I think it’s very likely we’ll continue to see slower growth, maybe an increase in the unemployment rate, particularly due to the federal hiring freeze and layoffs that have happened. It’ll be a very stark contrast to last year, where we saw government employment just kind of continue to expand.
Yazad Dalal: Well, I think our friends over at TalentNeuron can help fill us in on this. I’d love to hear what trends and outcomes they’re seeing in their data. Dave Wilkins, over to you.
David Wilkins: Yeah, I certainly can echo the sentiment. You know, 2024 was definitely a very strong year for federal job postings. What we’re seeing right now for January seems though to be markedly different. Federal government job postings fell by over a third in January year-over-year. Not surprising, I think given so, you know, all the news we’ve heard recently. What might be a surprise though is when you look at specific agencies in the federal government, there are agencies that are still hiring through January.
And while the federal job postings are down overall, it’s really not across every agency. For example, in January, Department of Defense, year-over-year, was up 115%. Department of Homeland Security was up 4%. The other big thing I think that’s worth thinking through as well, and we see this in the private sector as well, is that there’s often sort of a mixed situation going on. Like Department of Treasury hiring’s down overall by about 56%.
But when you look at hiring for analyst roles or hiring for AI kind of roles, those are built still up year-over-year. And we see similar kinds of things when we look at the private sector in the last six months or so. As people are experiencing layoffs, it’s often about redistributing talent into other areas. So there might be a loss of talent in a particular function, but a gain in talent as people are executing strategic pivots. We’re seeing similar kind of things in the federal government as well.
So you know, I think all of this, you know, to David’s point, will be borne out in February and March as we get more trends and more data. But I think we’re seeing similar things to what you guys just articulated.
Yazad Dalal: Well, look, I want to thank you, Dave Wilkins, and of course, David Garrett, and thank you to all of our listeners. Don’t forget to visit us at joveo.com, and we’ll see you again soon.
Conclusion
This episode wrapped up with our experts confirming that while job growth might not be skyrocketing, the labor market is holding its own. We also got the lowdown on how some surprising shifts, especially in federal government hiring, are shaking things up – so keep an eye out for those ripple effects as the year unfolds!
