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Hiring Is Spiking in These 5 Industries, Despite a Weak Jobs Report

By: Adam Hardy
Adam Hardy, expert in Personal finance, student loans, credit, job market, low-income finances, and Lead data journalist at Money
Adam Hardy
Lead data journalist | Joined December 2024
Adam Hardy is a lead data journalist at Money, where he frequently reports on financial barriers that affect low-income Americans. Adam’s work has also appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, Nasdaq, The Penny Hoarder, Yahoo! Finance and many other outlets.
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Published: Dec 03, 2021 4 min read
Photo collage of a teacher, an artist drawing on an ipad and a manufacturing plant
Money; Getty Images

Professional social media network LinkedIn says hiring on its site has reached the highest levels it has ever seen.

The U.S. hiring rate across all industries rose 7.4% in November compared to October, according to the company. And compared to last November (when the pandemic was raging), the hiring rate was up 26%.

“National hiring also jumped 5.7% above pre-COVID (February 2020) levels — the highest rate we’ve seen not only since the pandemic started, but since LinkedIn began tracking hiring rates in early 2015,” LinkedIn economists wrote in a new report.

Several industries ravaged by the pandemic have been seeing a strong rebound in hiring, though that hardly means the jobs market is in the clear (more on that below).

Industries hiring the most

Of the industries LinkedIn tracked, 21 of 24 of them are exceeding their pre-pandemic hiring levels. Here are the ones that saw the highest rates of month-over-month growth in November:

  • Education (13.5%)
  • Arts (12.9%)
  • Manufacturing (12.6%)
  • Hardware and networking (11.8%)
  • Corporate services (10.5%)

The year-over-year hiring rates for several sectors top 40%. Unsurprisingly, hiring in the recreation and travel industry has surged lately, up 71.7% compared to November 2020, when many people were still reluctant to venture far from home.

One important caveat of LinkedIn's report is that it's looking only at the rate that companies on its site are hiring. That's not necessarily a reflection of new jobs being created per se, or of all different kinds of hiring that's happening nationally. Instead, the report is more a snapshot of hiring activity in general.

Employers on LinkedIn could be hiring more frequently now for a host of reasons. Among other things, job openings have been at or near record highs in 2021, and companies have been doing what they can to backfill positions left open from mass resignations.

Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks separate employment indicators, provides a fuller picture. That report also signals a recovery, albeit a mixed one.

The unemployment rate dipped to 4.2% in November — down from a record high of 14.8% in April 2020, and slightly higher than the sub-4% rates of late 2019. The economy added 210,000 nonfarm jobs, though that figure is well below expectations.

Despite the less-than stellar jobs report, Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, points to the 6.1 million total jobs added in 2021, for an average monthly rate of 555,000.

“We are on track for a full recovery by the end of 2022,” she tweeted.

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