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 about the US jobs report for October 2025 with our own in-house Labor Market Economist, David Garrett, and joining us is our friend Rucha Vankudre, the Senior Labor Economist from TalentNeuron, our amazing partner for end-to-end workforce transformation. So welcome, David and Rucha!

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 and Rucha, the government shutdown is finally wrapping up, but the BLS has said they’re not going to provide data for October at all. Yesterday we saw, on November 12th, that the White House is now actually quoting the state of local commerce report that gets published by DoorDash.

But the three of us are going to look at reporting from some other highly credible private sector resources. In this case, we’re going to look at ADP and we’re going to look at what Challenger Gray are saying. ADP said that the top performers in October were trade, transportation, utilities, that they added 47,000 new jobs right behind them, education and healthcare with another 26,000 jobs, financial activities also chipped in with 11,000 more. So these are some good bright spots.

Where was there some bad news? Information sector jobs dropped by 17,000. I think that’s a signal that maybe tech and media are continuing to tighten up. Professional and business services lost 15,000 jobs. So we continue to see that slowdown in consulting. And even leisure and hospitality, which had been on the rebound, also shed 6,000 positions. And that’s from ADP. And then Challenger Gray is reporting that they saw that layoffs reached a two-decade high in October.

That’s over 153,000 cuts for the month and a total of 1.1 million layoffs so far this year, which is a 65% increase in layoffs from the previous period. Rucha, I have a lot of questions. What do you make of all this news? What are you seeing from your end at TalentNeuron?

Rucha Vankudre
So I really think the slowing of the labor market was pretty much inevitable given all the forces that we’ve seen at play this year. There’s been a lot of shifting policies. Immigration enforcement has really slowed the influx of labor. And then uncertainty around tariffs has meant it’s much harder to plan for the future for business leaders. And usually in times of uncertainty, employers tend to pull back. So earlier this year, Powell had said that we were in a low-hire, low-fire environment when he was explaining why the decision to lower rates.

I think many people now, considering the Challenger Report from last week, might be worried that we’re moving into a low-hire, high-fire territory, but I don’t really think we’re there quite yet. Many of these big-name layoffs that we’ve heard about in the past few weeks have sort of been coming for a while. I think a lot of the employees there were really waiting for these to be announced. Workforces have been continuing to shrink after over-expansion during the pandemic.

And there’s been some evidence that AI is reducing the need for workers. It’s mostly been true in entry level positions. I think, you know, even in those occupations that are very highly affected by automation, the mid-range and higher-range jobs really still are seeing kind of steady levels of hiring. I think that being said, there’s definitely going to be a lot more unemployed and underemployed people here this year as we head into 2026 compared with the past couple of years.

Yazad Dalal
You know, that “low-hire, high-fire”… one of those memorable phrases for an unfortunate reason, but I think that’s something that we’re going to see used a lot in the future. And I know, of course, the point about the AI… affecting entry level. I think everyone college age, young professionals are clearly worried. So are their parents. David, what are we seeing in Joveo’s own data?

David Garrett
Yeah, I mean, following up, but I think we’re going to see more candidates entering the market, obviously, with the recent layoffs. The job seeker pool is going to continue expanding if this continues, which it seems like it might, based off the recent announcements. What’s less clear so far from the sort of programmatic or job board spaces, how it will affect performance metrics. Like, you know, your cost-per-click, your cost-per-apply. It’s most likely, in my opinion, that costs may hold steady or even rise, particularly for those high demand industries. You know, because you’re still competing for top talent, even with more people entering the market.

And, you know, going through our own data backs this up. We’ve seen job postings drop by about 3% since last month. We followed a similar decline actually from what JOLTS was seeing in terms of like month over months, up until they stopped putting out data. You know, at least as far back as they released in August I think. So, you know, CPCs and CPAs are up roughly 7% each, month over month across a range of industries.

So a lot of this is really just, you know…even with these people entering the market does not mean that it’s becoming easier to find candidates for those people who are still hiring more. I think one thing a lot of people should consider is talent quality in particular. Some strong candidates will get caught up in layoffs, but the overall rise in application volume will likely inflate downstream costs, like your cost-per-hire, your cost-per-qualified-applicant, just because there are more people to filter through and then…I know in some discussions with clients, a lot of people are concerned about this era of AI generated applications with this flood of recruiters who have the perfect resume, perfect keyword matching for their jobs. So really leveraging those solutions that help with targeting, screening and candidate quality optimization is going to become increasingly necessary as these candidates enter into the market.

Yazad Dalal
Yeah, I think that’s really useful, David, for those employers that are continuing to hire and to understand the impacts on costs and quality, especially as they start budgeting for 2026. So we’ll all keep watching this closely. Thank you, Rucha and David. A big thank you also to all our partners at TalentNeuron. Thank you to our listeners. Don’t forget to visit us at joveo.com and we will see you again soon.