MOST 'RECESSION-PROOF' JOBS IN 2022

Job openings across the economy—at 10.3 million—are down from record highs but far exceed the number of unemployed Americans, providing opportunities for workers who lose their jobs and those who choose to seek another.

Workers previously employed in other industries, including entertainment and leisure, transportation and delivery, and manufacturing, also found new jobs quickly, the ZipRecruiter data showed.

The job market for tech workers is slowing as the broader economy falters under the pressure of Federal Reserve interest rate increases and high inflation. Layoffs and hiring freezes are occurring at startups and large tech companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. that hired aggressively early on in the pandemic. The cuts are hitting workers in tech jobs—such as software engineers—and other corporate roles including recruiters.

A smaller share of tech workers is spending long periods searching for work after a layoff. About 5% of laid off tech workers who found jobs from April to October had spent more than six months hunting for work, down from 26% of those hired between August 2021 and February 2022, ZipRecruiter said.

ECONOMIC INDEX FALLS FOR NINTH STRAIGHT MONTH, FLASHING RECESSION WARNING

Wen Huber, age 23, was laid off from a videographer job at a real estate tech startup in late July. Mr. Huber, who lives near Seattle, thought it would take awhile to land a new position, given he didn’t have a four-year-college degree and many other job seekers were flooding the tech job market.

"When I was applying, to be honest, I didn’t feel very confident because there was such an influx of competition with a lot of people also being laid off," he said.

Mr. Huber had built up a savings buffer, allowing him to be more selective in his job hunt as he sought to pivot into social media. He documented his unemployment experience in a series of videos on LinkedIn. The videos helped him land an interview—and ultimately an offer—for a social media manager job at a software startup, Mr. Huber said. He started in September.

PANDEMIC LEARNING LOSS COULD COST STUDENTS $70,000 IN LIFETIME EARNINGS

Short job searches in tech have become slightly less common as the labor market slows from earlier in the year. Among people who recently lost a job and worked in tech previously, 37% found a new position within one month of starting to look, according to ZipRecruiter. That compared with 50% in February’s survey.

"We’ve definitely seen a slowdown in hiring, but the reason why is that the job creation level was beyond record highs because of the slingshot effect of the pandemic," said Ryan Sutton, district president at Robert Half, a global recruitment firm. "From August 2020 to May 2022, it wasn’t red-hot. It was lava-hot."

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