Construction hiring revives in June, but many other sectors remain hard-hit

Many U.S. industries’ hiring ambitions remain severely bruised by this spring’s economic cave-in, but a few sectors such as construction are taking tentative steps toward a recovery.

That’s the picture that emerges from the latest LinkedIn Hiring Report. Overall hiring in June was down a steep 39.6% from last year’s levels. All of the downturn occurred earlier in 2020, with the latest hiring rate remaining essentially unchanged from May’s lows. 

Industry breakdowns, as shown in the chart above, highlight the degree to which this year's hardest-hit sectors tend to involve jobs that become almost undoable when pandemic safety considerations restrict everyday personal interactions. 

In upstate New York, for example, the Ithaca Sciencenter was forced to postpone its intended June reopening until July, as the interactive museum wrestled with safety guidelines that require disinfecting after each visitor. “That’s a challenge in a hands-on museum,” the facility’s executive director told a local TV reporter.

Hiring in three such sectors -- corporate services, entertainment, and recreation and travel -- remains at less than half of last year’s rates. June’s reopening of some state economies brought a partial bounce-back from the spring’s near-frozen hiring markets. But a rise in COVID-19 cases in recent days brings the prospects of delays or even reversals of those gains.

By contrast, recent months’ hiring trends have been stronger in industries adapting to remote work or onsite use of personal protective equipment. Seven such examples are legal, hardware and networking, public safety, public administration, manufacturing, education and construction. All those fields are now posting hiring rates at least 75% of what those industries were showing a year ago.

Construction hiring showed a particularly strong bounce-back in June. Cranes and jackhammers are working again in many big cities’ central business districts, as pandemic-related restrictions are eased. 

Early in June, New York City cleared 33,000 building sites to reopen, with an instant payoff for construction workers. Carpenter John Melon, who had been jobless since March, told a local radio station: “It’s good to be back.”  

Residential construction has been running strong, too, as unusually low interest rates have led to a pickup in new-home buying -- and construction. The Mortgage Bankers Association estimates that applications to purchase newly built homes this year are running 18% ahead of the year-earlier rate. 

The legal sector saw a big pickup in June hiring, but that’s probably just a calendar quirk. In ordinary times, legal firms typically hire many new associates in May, right after law school graduations. This year, however, hiring cycles were delayed -- causing an artificial drop in May’s legal hiring numbers and an offsetting, also artificial spike in June’s onboarding.

America’s largest cities embraced sharply different strategies in June, in terms of how quickly they moved to reopen restaurants, stores and other business activity. Cities in Texas and Florida reopened quickly and were rewarded -- at least temporarily -- with hiring growth. 

Miami posted a 19.9% jump in its June hiring rate versus a month earlier. On that same month-to-month basis, Houston was up 13.4%; Austin showed a 9% rise, and Dallas gained 8.6%. Such rebounds, however, are now imperiled by rising COVID-19 cases in reopened areas -- to the point that some cities are reversing their strategy and reinstating closures. Meanwhile, hiring rates in Miami, Houston, Austin and Dallas remain roughly 30% behind the year-earlier pace.

At the other extreme, June’s hiring rates kept falling in cities with slower reopening strategies. New York was down 21.1% compared to May; San Francisco was down 6.9%, and Los Angeles declined 1.6%. Compared with a year ago, both California cities’ hiring rates are down slightly more than 40%; New York’s is down 57.1%

We are following the economic impact of COVID-19 week-over-week in our U.S. Recovery Tracker, shown below. The tracker examines key job market metrics such as hiring, job postings and the workforce stress levels, among other stats. (You can learn more about what we’re tracking here.) Our latest update shows a modest improvement in the LinkedIn Hiring Rate -- and significant worsening in the volume of new COVID cases.  

Hiring 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 Jenny Ying contributed to this article.