Job market collapse hidden to prop stocks, top 10% keep spending while millions face rising unemployment. Cass Freight index plunges. Only weaker at the depths of the GFC.

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Signs Of A White-Collar Recession Are Everywhere

Declines in job openings and slowing wage growth point to a difficult environment for white-collar workers, especially white-collar job seekers

Slowing wage growth. Declining job openings. Unemployed workers giving away their LinkedIn passwords and forking over thousands of dollars per month for a shot at that elusive thing: a lucrative corporate job. Or just a job, period.

Beneath the headline employment numbers in BLS reports, the signs of a white-collar recession are mounting. Here’s what to know.

Contracting white-collar growth
Last week’s jobs report showed key trends. According to the BLS, the economy added more than 130,000 jobs total, including 82,000 jobs added in health care and a further 42,000 in related care work — think nursing home staff, home health aides, and childcare workers.

But strip out those gains, and the picture that emerges is one of contraction, not underlying strength. Federal government employment (-34,000) fell. The same report also showed some white-collar fields — like financial services (-22,000) — seeing marked declines. Other white-collar categories simply stayed flat, neither growing nor contracting, even as corporate capex rises to historically unprecedented levels.

A decline in jobs openings, and a trend of ‘reverse recruiting’
Recent data showing declines in white-collar job openings tells a similar story. Listings for roles in professional and business services appear to have fallen to their lowest level in more than a decade (excluding the deepest pandemic-era lows of 2020), the steepest declines of any sector.

There are now roughly 1.6 openings per 100 employees across professional and business services, a marked drop over recent years. The hiring rate has dropped to levels last seen during the 2008 financial crisis.

Job searches now last an average of six months, federal data suggests. Some job seekers are even turning to “reverse recruiting,” paying headhunters steep monthly fees or salary commissions to take over their LinkedIn profiles and apply for roles on their behalf. It’s hardly a practice that would ever emerge in boom times.