• Job seekers are substantially less interested in lower-wage, in-person sectors like loading & stocking and personal care & home health than they were before the pandemic.
• Median advertised hourly wages are strongly correlated with rising job seeker interest, even more than a sector’s share of remote work.
• For employers in low-wage, in-person sectors, raising wages may be the only significant way to attract more applicants.

Employer demand for labor continues to rise as we slowly emerge from the pandemic. But there’s yet to be a flood of job seekers to fill open positions and many employers are left scratching their heads. In the short term, employers are trying to sweeten deals, with the share of job postings advertising hiring incentives doubling since last year.  To find out what jobs workers are looking at, the Indeed Hiring Lab has developed the Relative Job Seeker Interest metric. Our new measure captures changes in job seeker interest in an occupational sector since the beginning of the pandemic compared with the average job. Our pre-pandemic baseline is February 1, 2020. A positive change in this metric since then means, compared with the average posting, the sector has become more attractive to job seekers than before the pandemic….”