Jobless claims remain ‘frightening’ as employers pull back on hiring

While the surge in online delivery and grocery sales in March meant new job opportunities at food delivery services, grocers, and pharmacies, those bright spots have grown dim, according to a recent report by Indeed. Yahoo Finance’s Sibile Marcellus joins Seana Smith to discuss.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance's live market coverage. Indeed is out with a new note today saying that not only does the pace of layoffs remain at unprecedented levels but hiring intentions also remain depressed.

We have Sibile Marcellus looking into this for us. And, Sibile, I guess how big of a slump in job postings are we seeing at this point?

SIBILE MARCELLUS: Well, it's significant, Seana. We're seeing a 45%-- over 45% slump when it comes to new job openings. That's what Indeed defines as jobs that have been posted over the seven last days or less.

Now what we're seeing is that since the US economy shut down seven weeks ago, we've seen more than 33 million people lose their jobs. That's including 3 million who filed for unemployment last week. Now nearly 7 in 10 Americans are saying that their income has shrunk because of the coronavirus pandemic.

So I wanted to look at this Indeed research to find out what the labor job prospects are for people who were recently laid off trying to get back into the game, and what we're seeing is that the prospects are getting dimmer by the day. So in March we saw that when it came to grocers, pharmacies, food-delivery services, there was a surge in hiring, but that has since stalled. Amazon, for example, the biggest e-commerce retail giant, they boasted about hiring 75,000 workers in April after hiring 100,000 in March. But we're seeing that overall in the sector, jobs in loading and stocking are growing but at a slower pace that they were compared to this time last year.

Also, when it comes to nurses and pharmacists, despite the fact that we're still seeing over a thousand deaths per day because of the coronavirus, what we're seeing is that those job growths have actually turned negative. They're down more than 25% compared to this time last year.

And it's also doing a domino effect on the labor market where it's spreading to areas, jobs that people could actually do from home. So software developers, jobs in banking, also finance are down more than 30% compared to this time last year.

SEANA SMITH: All right, important stuff there. Sibile Marcellus, thanks so much for breaking that down for us.