Job growth once again came in hot for May, marking the 10th-straight-month that economists have underestimated the pace of new job creation. This runs counter to the layoff narrative that has continued through the fall in symbolically important sectors like tech and finance. However, the data shows that despite falling job openings and news coverage of layoffs around late April, hiring conditions will remain tight for the foreseeable future.
While confidence among job searchers has cooled off - partly due to the same news coverage of layoffs - data and polling firm Morning Consult finds that higher expectations and job switching are durable and persistent. In their State of Workers 2023 Report, the firm found that job searching remains above pre-pandemic levels, and expectations of higher pay for job-switching has remained elevated, even as the actual pay bump from doing so has fallen.
This appears to reflect structural changes in employees' expectations, with a bias towards job switching being built in, quiet quitting seen as more legitimate, and salary expectations for 2023 elevated from pre-pandemic levels. As Vistage’s Head of Research, Joe Galvin, put it at the recent executive summit in Philadelphia, “[Hiring] will get easier, not easy”, no matter how much the news focuses on layoffs.
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