Introduction
Welcome to Recruiting Realities, your weekly dose of all things hiring! Today, we’ve got a double dose of David for you as we dive into the April 2025 US jobs report with our very own labor market guru, David Garrett, and our awesome friend David Wilkins from TalentNeuron! We’re digging into those unexpected job gains, the surprising jump in long-term unemployment, and how big-picture stuff like tariffs is shaking up hiring strategies. Get ready for some serious insights!
Yazad Dalal: Hi everyone, I’m Yaz 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 US jobs report for April 2025 with two of our friends, our in-house labor market economist David Garrett and our friend David Wilkins from our wonderful partners TalentNeuron, who are the experts in strategic workforce planning, talent marketplace and market intelligence. So hello David and David!
David Garrett: Howdy.
David Wilkins: Hello.
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 David Garrett, the most recent jobs report came out for April. The US labor market added an estimated 177,000 jobs. That’s more than 133,000 that were forecasted. I think the March numbers were revised downwards from 223,000 to 185,000. That’s a drop of over 40,000 jobs. But the unemployment rate is still unchanged, 4.2%. However, the number of long-term unemployed went up by 179,000, which for our listeners is those people who have been jobless or without jobs for 27 weeks or more.
So, I think there are some interesting stats there. And across sectors, we continue to see gains in healthcare, transportation, warehousing, financial activities, and social assistance while federal government employment continues to decline. Obviously, if you are watching the news there’s some very evident reasons for that.
Also want to point out in Joveo’s own data, a number of our clients have seen a spike in applications especially for corporate roles from former government employees. So no surprise hopefully that becomes a virtuous circle and we’ve talked about that before as well. David Garrett I have lots of questions. Let’s get started. First off, what are your key takeaways from this latest report?
David Garrett: Yeah, I mean as you know surprisingly good report all things considered. You know and I think as we discussed a bit on our last call or last time we spoke, it was you know we’re just starting to see those initial impacts from the new tariff policy that the government is implementing. And it’s, you know as anybody has been paying attention, you saw that Q1 sort of contracted. I think we’re like 0.3%, not a lot in the grand scheme of things but still sort of like a canary in the coal mine a little bit. You know, it was primarily due to imports. It was an excessive number of imports due from companies or consumers trying to get ahead of the tariffs which, you know, we only saw 20% on goods from China and 25% on steel and aluminum go into effect in March.
You know, and job growth staying relatively stable is great. The unemployment staying relatively stable is also great. But you know, something around like 80% of job growth over the past few months has been from uh healthcare, government, leisure and hospitality which are facing increasing shortages for labor and budget cuts. So, you know, these may or may not hold out as far as future job growth based off of the lagging effects from tariffs.
Yazad Dalal: Got it. And David Wilkins, what are you and the TalentNeuron team seeing out of this report?
David Wilkins: Yeah. So, I mean, I’d echo David’s comments. I mean, I think it was an unexpectedly strong month, you know, with job gains, succeeding forecast, but, you know, we’re seeing, I think, some cautionary notes in the forward-leading data, you know, of future hiring, right? So, we know looking historically when the economy is really expanding and starting to pick up steam, you typically see employers not just hiring to fill essential roles, but also those roles that are linked to them being able to grow, right? So things like recruiters, for example, and HR functions, when you hire for those kinds of roles, it’s indicative of the fact that you think you’re going to expand and be hiring more people.
But in April of 25, what we saw is demand for recruiter roles were down about 32% year-over-year. And that’s the slowest April for that role we’ve seen in like the last four years, right? We see similar kinds of patterns when you start looking at marketing roles and marketing managers in particular. Again, if you think you’re going to be growing, you typically would invest in the marketing function as a lead gen sort of advanced, you know, mechanism to bring in deals and bring in business. That’s down about 69% year-over-year. And even a role like a warehouse supervisor and, I know you mentioned Yaz, warehouse you know overall has looked really good but a warehouse supervisor which is a role you might expect to be affected by potential tariff impacts that’s down about 57% year-over-year.
So, you know what I’m hearing also from clients is there’s a little bit of a mentality of maybe we wait and see a little, and there’s starting to be this emerging zeitgeist of like between AI and tariffs like yeah, you know, maybe we shouldn’t be going so hard. So, you know, we’re not sure yet if this is a pullback of, you know, a sign of things to come or if people are just kind of staying put because things are a little more static, but it would sort of suggest given, you know, consumer confidence is really at an all-time low right now that you know, some of this is trickling into future, you know, sort of opinions of the management teams, right?
I think on the one positive to just you know, not be a complete Debbie Downer, right? um is that I think some of this is very much in the control of certain regulatory policies which we’ve seen kind of go back and forth a little bit. So I think some of this could change on a dime and I think it’s on all of us to just sort of pay attention and see what happens next.
Yazad Dalal: Appreciate that, and none of us want to hear that womp womp from Debbie Downer. Well, listen, thank you David Garrett and David Wilkins. David Wilkins, I’ll see you later this week at Unleash America here in Las Vegas. And thank you to 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 revealing a mixed bag: while job additions were a pleasant surprise, the increase in long-term unemployment and a “wait and see” attitude from employers signal caution. It seems like companies are hitting the brakes on roles tied to growth, so keeping an eye on those forward-leading indicators will be key for navigating the changing talent landscape!
