As U.S. hiring skids, Atlanta and 5 other cities fight back

Are the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic hitting all parts of the United States equally? Or is each region confronting a different fate? A new study by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team reveals some striking clues.

The analysis focuses on monthly hiring rates in the 20 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, as tracked by job updates on LinkedIn members’ profiles. Nationwide hiring in March fell 1.3%, month to month, as health worries intensified and shelter-in-place became the new norm. That was the biggest month-to-month drop in more than four years.

Meanwhile, the impact in each urban area has varied widely. 

City trends can be divided into three categories, starting with the four hardest-hit cities. In each of them, March's hiring rates slumped more than 10%, versus February’s rate. Detroit was affected most severely, with a 20.6% drop. Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York all were down at least 15%. Both Detroit and New York City are in states that have seen the most intense outbreaks of the pandemic so far. 

In the middle zone are 10 cities where March’s hiring rate was moderately affected, falling 3% to 10% month-over-month. The least severe impacts were in Nashville (down 3.1%) and Chicago (down 3.2%), with progressively larger declines in Austin, Miami, Houston, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington, D.C., Phoenix and Minneapolis, which was down 8.4%.

The third category consists of six cities where hiring has been most resilient so far. Atlanta tops the list, with a decline of just 1.6% in its March hiring rate, compared to February. Cleveland, Seattle, St. Louis, Denver and Dallas also saw less than 3% slippage month over month.

It’s important to note that hiring is only part of the overall jobs picture. Labor trends right now are shaped even more powerfully by the layoff rate. In the past two weeks, the U.S. Labor Department has announced weekly unemployment claims totaling nearly 10 million -- a record pace that's far above the full-month job losses during the toughest parts of the 2008-10 Great Recession. 

As the pandemic cycle plays out, there should come a time when shelter-in-place restrictions can be relaxed and more normal economic activity can resume. Signs of stabilization and the first stirrings of a rebound can already be seen in some Asian economies, such as South Korea and Singapore, that encountered the coronavirus earlier.

In an interview two weeks ago, LinkedIn’s chief economist, Karin Kimbrough, laid out the case for a brief, deep economic drop, followed by a measured recovery that unfolds over multiple months. If strong public safety measures take hold and reduce the spread of coronavirus, Kimbrough observed, “it doesn’t have to last a long time.”

In Atlanta, where March hiring remained relatively healthy, the new era of “social distancing” is jolting the local economy. Atlanta had expected to host a major dentists’ conference in March; that was canceled. The Final Four tournament for men’s college basketball was due to take place in Atlanta this coming weekend; that’s been called off, too.

As William Pate, chief executive of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “You don’t need people to clean rooms that aren’t occupied. You don’t need people to work in restaurants if no one is eating there.” 

This week, local government officials told residents of Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, to shelter in place, rather than continue their normal daily routines. Many other big cities have already taken such steps; Atlanta now is part of the trend.

As local economies try to withstand the pandemic to some extent, attention has focused on sectors with expanding demand as their roles become more vital. In Cleveland, one such example is Parker Hannifin. In an open letter March 26, the manufacturing company’s chairman and CEO, Tom Williams, said his company is “stepping up to deliver technology used in ventilators to help those who are sick.”

Seattle’s largest employer, Amazon, on March 16 announced plans to hire as many as 100,000 people nationwide, mostly at its giant distribution centers around the country that help get merchandise to customers. But Amazon is hiring briskly at headquarters, too. In the first two days of this week alone, Amazon posted 89 Seattle-based jobs on its careers page, ranging from software engineers to sales representatives.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a booming tech sector has driven job growth for nearly a decade. Now, though, tech hiring has cooled -- and health care has become the new growth sector, as hospitals and clinics staff up rapidly for the prospect of a much bigger patient load.

A case in point is Alameda Health System in Oakland, Calif., which has 277 open jobs listed on LinkedIn. The positions its hospitals are seeking to fill include nurse practitioners, physician assistants, clinical nurse IVs and an ambulatory care medical director. More broadly, “We have a critical need for nurses, doctors and the operations staff that supports them,” says Theresa Wilkerson, a recruiter at Alameda Health.

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 scientist Brian Xu contributed to this article.