Is the Job Market Improving? | Hacker News Reader

Is the Job Market Improving?

6 pointsrizs127 comments

Just looking at job postings data it seems like: no, but it's been relatively stable (or only slowly getting worse) since early 2024.

Looking at Indeed data, most of the decline in postings was in 2022H2 and 2023, with only ~10% annual decline since then: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE . In other countries the movement wasn't as sharp but has more or less caught up with the US by this point.

HN's own "Who's Hiring/Looking" posts follow a similar but perhaps slightly rosier trend - pretty flat since late 2023: https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/ (Note: this site counts only top-level looking/hiring comments, to reduce noise from replies)

The job market is a diverse place, but since you are posting this on HN I assume you are most interested in tech hiring. My anecdotal perusing of layoffs.fyi seems to indicate “no”. It seems like last month was an unusually high month for layoffs and I’ve been surprised by the lack of commentary on this.

If you look at the chart, the spike in April 2025 and in August 2024 were both largely because of layoffs at one company: Intel.

It seemed like it at least stabilized, or even slightly improved over the past 6 months. Now the last month or so it seems to be on a downward slide. This is mostly anecdotal with my own searches and the internal company job board numbers.

After many months of zero contacts on LinkedIn, these past 2 weeks I got contacted by 5 different recruiters so for me, it seems unusually better than recent. I was just thinking that maybe the market is improving.

There isn't just one job market, but anecdotally for tech jobs in the USA, it seems to be improving.

Here's the ratio of who is hiring vs who wants to be hired comments over the past 10 months. I'd ignore May because it is only the 3rd, and I expect the number of comments to change in the next few days.

April looks good, but hard to tell any firm trends.

   Month           Hiring Wants to Be Hired  Ratio (Hiring : Hired)
   May 2025        304    297                1.02 : 1
   April 2025      512    324                1.58 : 1
   March 2025      535    514                1.04 : 1
   February 2025   662    533                1.24 : 1
   January 2025    515    439                1.17 : 1
   December 2024   491    444                1.11 : 1
   November 2024   507    380                1.33 : 1
   October 2024    500    446                1.12 : 1
   September 2024  519    446                1.16 : 1
   August 2024     486    404                1.20 : 1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com