Bright spot!? The rush to fill recreation and travel jobs is an outright frenzy

Overall hiring in the United States rose 2.9% in August, versus a month earlier, but it hasn’t quite made it back to the pre-COVIDs level of February 2020, according to the latest edition of LinkedIn’s monthly Hiring Report. Everything’s happening faster, however, in the suddenly booming travel and recreation sector.

Hiring needs are soaring, as Americans get back in the habit of dining out -- and traveling for the fun of it. LinkedIn data shows that overall hiring in recreation and travel has skyrocketed 51.4% since the pre-COVID levels of February 2020. That’s more than double the tempo of the next fastest-growing sector, transportation and logistics, which is up 22.7%.

You can sense this boom in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where local hotels and restaurants are holding a two-week virtual job fair. In New Mexico, “pretty much every restaurant that you see has a sign outside that they’re looking for folks,” Carol Wight, head of the state’s restaurant association, recently remarked.?

What’s unusual about this hiring frenzy -- compared with other scrambles in recent years for more software engineers, more nurses, or more oilfield workers -- is that rising business demand isn’t the only driver. Through the travel and recreation sector, employers also are scrambling to offset a big exodus of workers who quit for good in 2020 and don’t want to come back.

The net effect: high churn rates are creating hiring demand that goes well beyond what business upturns alone would dictate.?

In the hotel and restaurant sectors, the cooks and servers of years past “are moving to completely different industries,” according to Sekou Siby, head of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a worker advocacy group in New York. Speaking on a WNYC radio program, Dr. Siby said: “Others are going into larger corporations that can provide better wages and working conditions.”

In total, 14 of the 24 industries tracked by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team achieved August 2021 hiring levels that exceed their pre-COVID tempos of February 2021. As seen in the table above, standouts included transportation and logistics, software and corporate services (such as accounting and consulting).?

Within transportation, airlines are scrambling to hire as plane travel rebounds from 2020’s severely depressed levels. That’s causing an abrupt U-turn in staffing policy, after many carriers spent 2020 encouraging then-unneeded employees to take early retirement.?

Southwest Airlines is pushing to expand its headcount by 5,200 people, or 16% by the end of this year. As part of its scramble to find more candidates, Southwest is offering the equivalent of $300 in free flight or concert tickets to current employees, for each successful referral they can produce.?

At the other end of the spectrum, hiring in education and public administration remains well below pre-COVID levels. Education has rebounded somewhat this year from deep cuts in 2020, while government hiring took a less severe hit last year but hasn’t regained much traction since then.?

Even with these zigzag patterns, seven industries in August achieved their fastest hiring growth since the pandemic’s start, noted Guy Berger, LinkedIn’s principal economist. In alphabetical order, those seven are: arts, corporate services, energy and mining, hardware and networking, recreation & travel, software & IT services, and transportation and logistics

With August’s hiring data factored in, three metro areas have now posted double-digit percentage gains in hiring since the dawn of the COVID era in February 2020. They are: Nashville (+11.8%), Miami (+11.2%) and Austin (+12.2). Other strongholds include Atlanta (+8.8%) and Houston (+6.8%.)

Several hot spots of the pre-pandemic U.S. economy haven’t fared as well, though. Hiring trends over that same 19-month period remain sharply down overall in Washington, D.C. (-10.5%), Minneapolis (-7.9%) and the San Francisco Bay Area (-7.8%). Hiring rates haven’t yet fully recovered in Seattle (-4.8%) or Detroit (-3.8%) either.

Methodology

The LinkedIn Hiring Rate (LHR) is the percentage of LinkedIn members who added a new employer to their profile in the same month the new job began, divided by the total number of LinkedIn members in that country. By only analyzing the timeliest data, we can make month-to-month comparisons and account for any potential lags in members updating their profiles. Using the U.S. Census Bureau's method to calculate seasonal adjustment, we remove predictable seasonal hiring variations to allow for easier comparison between months and analysis of emerging hiring trends.

LinkedIn data scientists Brian Xu and Guy Berger contributed to this article.