LinkedIn saw 24% month-over-month decline in hiring in April: Economist

The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 14.7% due to the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. LinkedIn Principal Economist Guy Berger joins Yahoo Finance's On The Move to weigh in on employment trends in this month's LinkedIn Workforce Report.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let's get back to this unemployment report because there are some long-term ramifications that we need to discuss in regards to that. And to help us break this down, Guy Berger, who is LinkedIn's Chief Economist, joins us once again. He's a friend of the program. Guy, it's good to see you. Thank you for joining us.

GUY BERGER: Good to see all of you this morning.

ADAM SHAPIRO: There's a lot to begin with this, especially with the report that you have because, what? You have 167 million people signed up on LinkedIn, 20,000 companies. Every month, 3 million jobs get posted. Has that maintained throughout the COVID-19 crisis?

GUY BERGER: Well, we've definitely seen a pretty big impact from the crisis. We track hiring, people starting new jobs every month-- every day, actually. And in April, we saw a 24% month-over-month decline in the number of people starting new jobs. It's down 30% year over year. So there's been a really big hit in the US labor market, much as we saw with the BLS numbers.

JULIE HYMAN: Hey, Guy. It's Julie here. It's good to see you.

One of the interesting portions in the jobs report today was the percentage of people who do expect to be rehired. I saw one figure. It's 18.1 million, which is about 88% of the total. What are you seeing on LinkedIn that would give us any hints as to whether that's realistic?

GUY BERGER: That's a really good question because I think the number of these temporary layoffs that turn out to be permanent is the key-- is maybe the pivot point around the pace of the recovery.

I think it varies a lot by industry because when we look at it in our data, some industries have taken ahead. Like leisure and hospitality are going to struggle to come back even after shutdown orders are lifted if people are afraid to go to restaurants or to travel. But other ones like construction that, you know, took a really big hit in April-- we saw construction down by about 40% month over month. They might actually be able to at least snap back somewhat because a lot of construction has been temporarily suspended.

So it's going to vary a lot by industry. Some people might-- you know, there's going to be a minority people that go back to work really quickly and other ones that find that what they thought were temporary layoffs tend to be really permanent, and that's really unfortunate and sad.

AKIKO FUJITA: Guy, when you think about who's hiring right now, obviously we've seen the big tech names that, as they see their services ramped up, trying to hire, to expand capacity, but I'm curious about what other sectors you're seeing growth in outside of tech. You know, it seems like, for example, health care is now looking more for remote help, and so they're hiring different types of jobs. Can you talk about the shift that you've seen as a result of all the remote working in sectors that we traditionally wouldn't see that kind of hiring?

GUY BERGER: Well, so the first thing is even though, you know, your question was primarily focused on nontech, I will mention there's a split in tech between software where you've seen, you know, not an enormous [INAUDIBLE] pretty large, [INAUDIBLE] on the hiring in hardware and networks, that has done the best of any sector we tracked. It was actually the only sector we look at where hiring was up month over month. So I think that our society is actually literally, as well as metaphorically, rewiring for the fact that a lot of work needs to be done from home. You also see public safety doing a little less bad.

With health care, there's a mix because you are seeing simultaneously there's demand for certain kinds of workers-- we hear all the time about contact tracers-- but also that a lot of the nonessential medical services have shut down. I mean, one of the biggest job losses in today's BLS data was dentists' offices.

So it's really a mix, and I think within health care what is really important is being able to shift that labor from things that's shutting down to things that are in really high demand, and right now we haven't yet managed to do that as a society and economy.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Guy, I want to get back, though, to this issue or zero in on the issue of remote working because it has ramifications long term-- commercial real estate, commercial-real-estate bonds, all of those issues. You in the report talked about the fact that you saw the volume of job searches using the keyword remote or work at home jumping 42%. On the flip side, from those who are posting job listings, are you going to track, going forward, the use of words like work from home or remote, and will you be able to deduce what the implications are for the economy from that going forward?

GUY BERGER: Yeah, for sure. We're going to be tracking it. And I think what's interesting is-- and I think what we're all wondering is how durable that's going to be. Right now there's no [INAUDIBLE] if you're looking for a job, that's one of the first thing you're going to be looking for is can I work remotely? particularly if it's hard to get to work. You know, how long is it going to last? How much that will persist even once the health-care crisis will end? And I think that's something I'm going to be tracking pretty regularly going forward.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Is that a Peloton behind you?

GUY BERGER: Yes it is. So that's one [INAUDIBLE]--

ADAM SHAPIRO: All right.

GUY BERGER: --have adjusted.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Guy Berger keeping us up to speed and in shape on the economic numbers from LinkedIn. You are the chief economist. Thank you very much. And Peloton did not pay us for that shoutout. It's good to see you, Guy.

GUY BERGER: Good to see you guys too.