AI-related job postings increased 24% in March, says Recruiter.com's Evan Sohn

As we countdown to the big April jobs report tomorrow, our next guest too isn’t seeing much weakness. In fact, he says April is setting up to be a better month than the month of March. Let’s welcome back Evan Sohn, chairman of recruiter.com knows her thinking through to about the jobs market overall. Evan, we’ve seen a slew of data, especially when it comes to employment numbers, wage numbers. On balance, what do you think that sets us up for tomorrow for non farm payrolls? It is a very tight market and everyone keeps saying that it’s a tight market. We saw the recruiter index which we do monthly salaries were about 48%, sorry, 60% said unchanged. So really very little, very little changes on the salary levels. You look at the Joel report and 15% fewer quit rates than a year ago. So 3.5 million people quit in March, which is down 15% from where they were in March of 23. So hiring was at a 10% difference year over year less. But really, really interesting to watch that the that the salaries are stable. What that really tells you is that it’s going to be harder to get people to leave their job, to go take another job. We saw a very significant number of candidates through the recruiter index actually already having two or more jobs in the past two years. So there are jobs that are out there, even though the the open jobs we we saw from the Orange job report ticked up by 1%. What was really interesting, Dominic, was that the number of jobs that were remote only actually doubled from 11% to 22% of the jobs that the recruiters were working on. This is another indication of a tight job market. So while I might want to create a culture that has either an in person environment or a hybrid environment, in order to fill these roles, I’m going to have to go outside on my geographic area. What you’re seeing right now on the screen is that the open roles, the number of jobs that the recruiters were working on, also increased from 9:50 jobs in March to 13, 1/2 open rolls per recruiter in April. So there are jobs there. These are the knowledge worker jobs. We saw the salary, the average salary of those jobs increase from that 80 to $100,000 range to 100 to $150,000 range, which is really that knowledge worker level. OK, there’s a lot to unpack, so let’s start with where you just left a lot. There’s a lot we are concerned about inflation right now and people look at the wage numbers, they look at how many people are quitting their jobs to take new ones, presumably, hopefully with higher paying aspects to those particular jobs are moving into. We are starting to see signs that that’s slowing down. People aren’t hopping as much and getting higher pay. That’s good for the inflation story, not as good for the wage story, but it’s good for inflation. But you’re telling us at the same time it’s becoming competitive in certain other parts of the market to get even workers in the door. What exactly is the kind of counterbalance there? What’s this? What’s tipping the scale one way or the other? And with that, if it’s going to be that way in the coming months, is there any sign that we would look for that says that this is reversing course at some point down the line? Excellent questions. I I don’t think it’s reversing anytime soon. We saw AI related jobs increased 24% March to April. So companies are hiring. They’re just getting very particular in what they’re hiring and if I need those AI jobs and we saw some sectors increased by over 100%. So really significant going on there on the AI hiring. It’s going to be difficult. You know what really moved people a lot a couple of years ago, the job hopper economy as you were talking about it was the increase of wages and if salaries are going to mean stable, why would I leave a job? I’m going to leave for a better work life balance, maybe they’re letting me work remotely, etcetera. And I think that’s really, really what’s changing now. What you’re seeing here now in the hottest job category, while healthcare and medical are again in the top category, it actually went down by 8%. That’s really significant because if you looked at the Joel number, the BLS numbers every single month with the job data that really came out was showing really being pulled by government jobs as well as healthcare jobs. And so these the healthcare market represent about 33% of the jobs to the recruiters in the recruiter index, but that’s down 8% from where it was a month ago and not just that. So you mentioned, I’d like to dig into that more the where all these jobs and what this, what this data suggests where the activity is. You mentioned all of this positivity, but it seems as though there’s only certain jobs in the economy that can be done on this kind of remote or hybrid basis. It certainly isn’t a manufacturing or industrial where people have to make things, it is those knowledge based areas of the market. So as we look in aggregate about these job stats, how much Salt Grain wise do we have to take with it if it’s just telling us about what certain types of industries are doing with their jobs fully remote or otherwise, hybrid or otherwise versus other aspects of the economy overall, great question. Look, I think healthcare you’re seeing healthcare allow a hybrid environment where you’re going to work in the office and number of days whether that’s the more knowledge worker involved in healthcare or even other practitioners that are dealing with patients in a telemedicine perspective. You know people are adopting to where the labor is, are you about to have Upwork on. That’s all about contract labor. When you can’t find full time labor, you move to contract labor. When you can’t find in person labor, you’re going to move to remote labor. And I think what’s really important to look out for really are the AI jobs that’s a very big increase and we’re seeing that you know is a an increase in the apparel and fashion industry Even so not just the IT sector and the financial sector on the AI jobs but in other industries. So there are jobs out there. The job market is still, it’s still open jobs, just you’re going to be more particular in finding those actual talent, which is why the recruiters as a staffing as an industry didn’t make it to the top five, but it’s in the top ten in terms of short sought after. And that’s usually a leading indicator, Dominic, of what’s to come in the market. All right. Evan Sung with The State of Play and Jobs, thank you very much. We’ll see you sometime after the jobs report comes out.