Hiring Came Back in September, Just Not for Everyone
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Private-sector hiring picked back up in September, and I’ll take it after the slowdown ADP’s own chief economist described. The ADP National Employment Report, produced with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, found private employers added 90,000 jobs, the first acceleration since May. August was revised down slightly, from 38,000 to 36,000. Dr. Nela Richardson called it “a strong report,” noting that “after a three-month slowdown, job creation rebounded and pay growth remained solid.”
Look at where those jobs came from before calling it a broad recovery. Education and health services added 55,000 jobs on their own, 61% of the entire month’s total, and together with leisure and hospitality’s 22,000, those two sectors account for 77,000 of the 90,000 jobs added. Manufacturing added 17,000 and construction added 15,000.
Office-heavy sectors moved the other way. Financial activities lost 16,000 jobs, professional and business services lost 11,000, and trade, transportation, and utilities didn’t move at all. If you’re hunting for a role in accounting, finance, or business operations, this month’s headline number isn’t describing the market you’re in.
Company size mattered too. Medium-sized businesses with 50 to 499 employees did most of the hiring, adding 54,000 jobs, including 36,000 at businesses with 250 to 499 workers specifically. Small businesses added 23,000, and large employers added just 14,000.
The regional map tells its own story. The Northeast led every region with 56,000 new jobs, and the Mid-Atlantic alone accounted for 47,000 of those. The West added 17,000, the South 11,000, and the Midwest 5,000. The South Atlantic, which includes Florida, and the East North Central division each lost 10,000.
Pay growth held up better than headcount did. Job-stayers saw base pay rise 3.0% over the past year, while job-changers saw 4.8%, a gap that widens to 4.4% versus 7.3% on gross pay. Construction posted the largest base pay gain of any sector at 4.0%.
This pay gap is the number I’d put in front of any manager building next year’s retention plan. A 1.8-point difference in base pay growth between the people who stayed and the people who left for something else is the size of your walk-away risk, and the employees most likely to act on it are the ones with real options elsewhere. If your best performers are watching job-changers pull ahead on pay, they’re doing the same math.
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LinkedIn’s CEO Says the Market Is Frozen, and Every Job Is Changing Anyway
LinkedIn CEO Dan Shapero told a room of recruiters at the company’s Talent Connect conference in New York this week that the job market is “frozen in place.” Layoffs are trending down. So are quit rates. Almost nobody is moving.
Underneath that stillness, Shapero says the work itself is changing fast. “Every job is going to be a new job,” he told the crowd, describing how AI is reshaping day-to-day tasks even in roles that aren’t disappearing. Nearly one-third of large companies reduced headcount over the past year while getting leaner, and revenue per employee at those companies rose 22%, evidence that fewer people are doing more, not that demand has dried up.
Shapero’s framing lines up with a problem I’ve watched build all year: hiring managers can no longer tell who’s real. A growing share of applicants are using AI to shape their resumes and interview answers around what they think an employer wants to hear, and LinkedIn’s own reporting on the same event found job seekers are now sending roughly 30% more applications than before the pandemic, flooding employers with a “sea of applicants” that Shapero said increasingly “look pretty similar.” LinkedIn’s answer is identity verification tied to a government ID or work email, along with newer tools like its Hiring Assistant meant to compare a resume against what the platform already knows about a candidate.
LinkedIn sells the verification and AI hiring tools Shapero was describing on that stage, worth keeping in mind as you weigh how much of this pitch is diagnosis and how much is product.
Whatever the source of the fix, the diagnosis matches what I hear from clients constantly. When 30% more applications aren’t matched by 30% more genuine signal, a hiring process built around resume volume stops working. The proof of whether someone can do a job has moved off the page and into an actual conversation, a reference from someone who worked alongside them, and a structured interview that tests real judgment instead of a well-written summary.
If your applicant pool has gotten harder to sort through, or you need recruiters who screen for substance instead of polish, explore our staffing services and let’s fix that pipeline. And if you’re the one applying, update your resume around the tools and skills your target role uses now, since Shapero’s own point is that the job you’re applying for may already look different than the title suggests. See what’s open right now and lead with what you can do today.
Musk Says AI Brings ‘Universal High Income.’ Plan for the Years Before That
Elon Musk spoke to reporters at the White House this week after a meeting of tech leaders, and he described a future far rosier than the labor market anyone’s hiring in right now. He predicted an “age of abundance” built on “universal high income,” a step beyond universal basic income, and said robots and superintelligence could eventually give everyone better medical care than exists today, “including me.”
Asked whether AI will destroy jobs, Musk didn’t deny it outright. “Jobs are going to change,” he said, pointing to a real historical example: “being a computer used to be a job” before machines took over the calculations people used to do by hand. He also said AI hasn’t caused unemployment to spike so far and described “tremendous demand for people” in the current market.
Musk joined Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei in signing a Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, pledging internal safety controls overseen by a dedicated team, an independent outside auditor, and an independent board committee.
Musk is right that jobs change. His own example proves it. What he skipped is the years workers and employers have to live through between one kind of work shrinking and the next kind showing up in enough volume to hire for. Universal high income is a prediction with no law or budget behind it today, so I wouldn’t build a career plan, or stop saving for retirement, on the assumption it arrives on schedule. Musk himself has sounded less certain elsewhere, calling the risk of AI going catastrophically wrong “not zero” and expecting a “bumpy” transition, and that’s the version I’d plan around.
The useful move right now is the ordinary one: learn the AI tools already changing your job before your employer asks you to, and build the kind of judgment and experience that doesn’t get automated away in the meantime.
