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Sometimes, the grass is greener on the other side. But, in this labor market, recruiters are wishing for greener pastures everywhere.
The white-collar job market has been cooling, just as the blue-collar market has been heating up. In fact, hiring rates are highest for workers making less than $55,000 a year, and lowest for those making more than $96,000, according to data from investment company Vanguard.
“We’re having two different experiences on the labor market that are quite night and day,” Rachel Sederberg, senior economist at research firm Lightcast, told HR Brew. “Depending on who you ask, the labor market is either very hot or very cold.”
This split-screen labor market might be the result of a couple of factors, Sederberg said. Society values higher education, but fewer job openings require a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, the average age of blue-collar workers has skewed older in recent years, so as Baby Boomers retire, there will be more roles than talent available to fill them, she said.
This hasn’t been easy for people pros, who don’t just recruit white-collar workers, but count themselves among them. Since she started recruiting for HR positions in 2007, Laura Mazzullo, founder of East Side Staffing, has seen the HR function endure three particularly bad years: 2008, 2020, and 2024.
“It’s not a great time to be a white-collar job seeker,” Mazzullo previously told HR Brew. “I just can only speak from experience that my inbox in 2024 has been layoffs after layoffs, and job seekers after job seekers that [are] in HR, or HR leadership…[They’re] deeply impacted.”
Whether you’re a recruiter struggling to find talent, or concerned about your future, Sederberg and Mazzullo shared advice for navigating this dynamic labor market.
Skills-based hiring and job hunting. Sederberg suggested that recruiters struggling to fill talent gaps in the blue-collar market lean into skills-based hiring.
“It opens up a lot more talent pools to reskill the workers you already have [and] bring in new workers for roles,” she said. “Be it a people professional, a data scientist…those skills are highly transferable across a whole host of roles.”
The inverse of this trend can also be used by recruiters who’ve been laid off or are looking for a new role. Mazzullo suggested “career soul searching” to “pivot” skills—or even passions— into different careers.
The year ahead. Sederberg said blue-collar workers will continue to be in higher demand than white-collar workers for the foreseeable future, due to economic trends that have been at play for years. Despite this, Mazzullo said she’s hopeful that recruiters and other white-collar professionals will see more hiring in the future.
“It’s just a matter of riding it out until it shifts again, but it’s hard to know when it’s going to be,” Mazzullo said.
