Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported only 142,000 new jobs created last month. This was the lowest level of jobs creation for the year! After six straight months of creating 200,000 or more jobs, only 142,000 jobs were created last month. This contrasted with the 225,000 jobs most economists expected.
However, the news was not all bad. Many sectors continued to shine including:
- Professional and Business Services, which added another 47,000 on top of the 47,000 new positions also added in July! These means that this sector has added: a) 169,000 new positions over the past 3 months and b) 639,000 over the past year!
- Health Care employment picked up steam and added 34,000 new positions in August.
- Leisure and Hospitality added 22,000 new jobs last month and 289,000 over the past year.
- Construction employment rose by 20,000 and an average of 18,000 per month over the past 12 months.
Also, anecdotally, my technical recruiters have observed a 35% increase in engineering recruiting, scientific recruiting and technical recruiting requests from the executive recruitment teams of companies we have never worked with before! This includes new openings for a wide range of R&D, scientific, engineering, IT, technical and manufacturing positions including both a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vice President of R&D. This also includes cutting edge fields like AI, VR and robotics.
This comes after many companies have been scared to add new talent over almost two years. As a result, they have only considered temporary or contract hires instead of full time employees due to the uncertainty of the economy. However, traditionally temporary or contract jobs are the first to come back in an economic upturn. Other full time positions usually come later.
What are your findings?
