The seasonal employment struggle

The holiday hiring season has begun in earnest, but job seekers may not have a very merry Christmas.

A new report this morning from the Indeed Hiring Lab revealed high demand for seasonal employment: Searches for holiday jobs were 27% higher last month than in September 2024, and 50% above September 2023.

The problem is that supply isn’t keeping up. Indeed noted that postings for new positions have risen just 2.7% year over year, and only 2% of holiday job postings are urgently hiring, well below the 10% in 2021.

“In short, the pool of seasonal job postings has shrunk gradually in recent years, while job seeker interest has surged. The result is a more competitive seasonal job market with fewer opportunities for a growing supply of workers,” the report said.

Employment blues

The US labor market has entered a low-hiring, low-firing period of stagnation that may leave holiday job seekers empty-handed. The problem is that employers worried about the effects of tariffs have limited their hiring and firing, while employees worried about the chances of a recession have stuck with the safety of their current jobs.

Add in job losses due to AI automation, coupled with fewer low-skilled workers as immigration dries up, and you’ve got a labor market that Jerome Powell recently described as “less dynamic and somewhat softer.”

“Available evidence suggests that both layoffs and hiring remain low, and that both households' perceptions of job availability and firms' perceptions of hiring difficulty continue their downward trajectories,” the Fed chair said in a speech earlier this week.

Don’t forget: The government remains shut down, which means we still haven’t gotten those September employment numbers from the BLS, nor have we gotten several weeks worth of initial jobless claims reports. What data we do have doesn’t paint a pretty picture: The latest JOLTS reading revealed that job openings as a share of total employment remain near a five-year low, while payroll processor ADP noted that private employers cut 32,000 jobs last month.

Plus, the longer the government remains shut down, the more likely it is that federal employees will begin looking for new jobs, creating more competition for work—even if a judge did temporarily block the Trump administration from firing as many as 10,000 federal employees.

More Americans are hunting for seasonal work at the same time that open positions have dried up, and while rising downside risks to employment mean that the Federal Reserve is more likely to cut interest rates again at its meeting later this month, that’s small consolation for Americans trying to find a job over the holidays.—MR