Key points:
- The Indeed Job Postings Index ended its multi-year slide this summer and has been stable at 11% to 13% above pre-pandemic levels since May.
- While some sectors — including physicians & surgeons and therapy — remain in high demand (postings are 80%+ above their pre-pandemic baseline), postings for tech occupations including software development remain 30% below 2020 levels.
- After declining for several years, postings in sectors that tend to offer the most remote work opportunities, including tech and finance, have remained flat in recent months, signaling a potential renewal in employer demand.
Our monthly Labor Market Update examines important trends using Indeed and other labor market data. Our US Labor Market Overview chartbook provides a more comprehensive view of the US labor market. Data from our Job Postings Index — which stands 12% above its pre-pandemic baseline as of October 11 — and the Indeed Wage Tracker (including sector-level data) are regularly updated and can be accessed on our data portal.
After declining steadily since January 2022, US job postings are leveling off. Despite dropping 11.8% from a year earlier, as of October 11, the US Indeed Job Postings Index (JPI) remains 12% above pre-pandemic levels, roughly unchanged since the end of May. This recent stabilization suggests that the cooling of the US labor market has paused, leaving job seekers with more opportunities on average than they had before the pandemic. But averages don’t tell the whole story.
If you average the temperatures of boiling water and a block of ice, the result would be lukewarm water — yet the two are very different! Likewise, employer demand in some labor market sectors remains high, while in others it has cooled considerably compared to a few years ago. For instance, US postings were still more than 80% above pre-pandemic baseline levels in healthcare-related fields like physicians & surgeons (+87%) and therapy (+82%) roles as of October 11. At the same time, demand for jobs in tech occupations including information design & documentation and software development were both about 31% below 2020 levels.
Make no mistake, the US labor market is still relatively solid, and employer demand in many large sectors is still elevated. However, there are diverging corners of the labor market where it has become more difficult to find new jobs quickly. For example, because of cooler employer demand in sectors like software development, it may feel much harder for workers seeking those roles to find a job now than a few years ago. But there are signs of a potential turning point.
Job postings in work-from-home sectors have leveled off in recent months
Of the 46 sectors analyzed by Indeed, job postings in about a third (15 sectors) were below their pre-pandemic baseline as of October 11 (the headline Job Postings Index for these sectors was below 100). In general, these 15 sectors tend to be knowledge-work industries that generally offer more work-from-home opportunities (think tech and finance roles). Over the last four months, postings in these high-remote jobs have remained relatively flat, with the majority of sectors only moving by a percentage point or two in their respective job posting index. Employer demand for tech workers in both the software development and IT operations & helpdesk sectors was about the same in October as it was in May, declining only slightly by 0.2 and 0.3 percentage points, respectively, over that period.
A flattening trend is also visible among low- and middle-remote roles, but there has been more variation within these categories. While postings have leveled off for these groups on average, there have been a lot of sector-level shifts in the last four months. For instance, seasonally adjusted demand for logistic support, a low-remote sector, picked up by 16 percentage points this summer. But this gain was nearly offset by a 13-point drop in postings for veterinary roles — another low-remote sector. Likewise, gains in middle-remote sectors like therapy (+12 points since May) were offset by corresponding drops from other sectors within the same tier, like education & instruction (-13). Despite these large shifts, employer demand remains strong overall in these sectors, and a lot of this movement is likely the result of continued rebalancing between employer demand and worker supply.
There are no signs of a major rebound in postings just yet, but the recent plateau is encouraging and may signal a potential end to the sustained slide in employer demand that began in early 2022. These sideways moves may not bring immediate comfort to workers, especially for those seeking jobs where demand remains relatively low, but it is a sign that more opportunities may be on the horizon.
Methodology
Data on seasonally adjusted Indeed job postings are an index of the number of seasonally adjusted job postings on a given day, using a seven-day trailing average. Feb. 1, 2020, is our pre-pandemic baseline, so the index is set to 100 on that day. We seasonally adjust each series based on historical patterns in 2017, 2018, and 2019. We adopted this methodology in January 2021. Data for several dates in 2021 and 2022 are missing and were interpolated. Non-seasonally adjusted data are calculated in a similar manner, except that the data are not adjusted to historical patterns.
The number of job postings on Indeed.com, whether related to paid or unpaid job solicitations, is not indicative of potential revenue or earnings of Indeed, which comprises a significant percentage of the HR Technology segment of its parent company, Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd. Job posting numbers are provided for information purposes only and should not be viewed as an indicator of the performance of Indeed or Recruit. Please refer to the Recruit Holdings investor relations website and regulatory filings in Japan for more detailed information on revenue generation by Recruit’s HR Technology segment.
