Why Looking for a Job This Year Could Be Less Miserable
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My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, January 15th. I'm Arianna Espuru for The Wall Street Journal.

After enduring 2024's uncertainties around the economy, artificial intelligence, and politics,

There's reason to believe your job search is about to get better. I hear from these people all the time. They've been looking for six months. And if you're listening to me right now with some skepticism, look, I totally get it. You have to look at those indicators from the CEO saying we expect to make these hires in the coming years and take that as a sign of encouragement. Wall Street Journal On The Clock columnist Callum Borshers joins me after the break. ♪

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There's a glimmer of hope for job seekers. Business leaders expect to ramp up hiring in 2025. Wall Street Journal On The Clock columnist Callum Borshers joins me. Callum, for pretty much all of last year, we heard a steady drumbeat of news about the labor market cooling off and hiring trending lower. What's changed? What's changed is maybe we've finally hit the trough, Arianna. At least we can hope for that. Because if you talk to three quarters of CEOs who run large companies, they say they think the global economy is going to improve.

in the first half of this year. And that's a big jump because when you ask them at the beginning of last year, only 45% said the same thing. And optimistic bosses are more likely to make hires. When did this change? Was it like January, sunshine, new beginnings, we have optimism now? Yeah, that's part of it. And the election was a factor as well. I talked to Brandi Britton, who

is in Robert Half's finance and accounting practice. And she said she was hearing a lot from clients that they were holding off on filling roles until after the election. More than anything, they wanted clarity, right? Businesses don't like uncertainty. Now they have that clarity, new administration coming in, and they say that they're ready to move forward with posting some of those jobs. I'm scared to ask this, but how firm does this hiring plan seem to be? What could completely derail it?

Yeah, it's not set in stone. And I will say part of the optimism that we heard from those CEOs in those surveys was tied to an expectation that with a Republican administration coming in, we may have lower taxes, maybe fewer regulations. Politically, whatever you think of those things, businesses often like those and they might think then they have a little bit more capital to spend on hiring.

The other side of that is if those expectations are not met, if we don't see fewer regulations or if we don't see lower taxes, then perhaps we won't see the hiring boost either. Now, last week, we spoke with our colleague Matt Grossman about his story on how it's taking white collar workers a longer time to land a job.

How do these hiring trends impact the job search for those office workers? I hear from these people all the time, Ariana. They've been looking for six months. And if you're listening to me right now with some skepticism, look, I totally get it. You have to look at those indicators from...

The CEO is saying we expect to make these hires in the coming years and take that as a sign of encouragement. And I think the other thing to think about, too, is it's not just about getting the job. I also hear constantly from people who are unhappy with the candidate experience.

Some of the CEOs I've been talking to, they say, we're getting the message now. We hear how people are dissatisfied with the hiring process, especially being left hanging by recruiters. And so we're really leaning on our people to make sure that at least we do people the courtesy of getting back to them. And you're on the phone constantly with staffing firms. What are they hearing from companies about their needs? One thing that really stood out to me in a recent conversation with Charlie Kane, who runs the Beacon Hill Solutions Group, is

was that they had a big jump in November in placements for human resources. In fact, he said it was double the number of placements for HR pros this November as it was the year before. And I was like, all right, what if I don't work in HR? What's the big deal? And he says, no, that can be the bellwether.

Because when companies are staffing up in human resources, that often means they're getting ready to hire another department. That's another little bit of a sunbeam. Are there any other types of jobs that you heard from employers that they're looking to fill pretty soon? LinkedIn every year does this list of 25 fast-growing jobs for the coming year. And so in 2025, you won't be surprised to know that a lot of them are tied to artificial intelligence in some way. In fact, the top two jobs are

on that list are AI engineer or AI consultant. But other things on the list are also like real world hands-on type of jobs that can't easily be automated. So like number three on the list, for example, is physical therapist. So there are certain sectors where you do see a hunger for growth in the coming year.

One of the biggest perceived threats to jobs is AI, artificial intelligence. How does that fit into companies' plans to ramp up hiring? It's interesting because AI on its face, of course, would seem to threaten some jobs, and of course it can. But I also hear from some CEOs who say we needed some time to...

to kind of assess the capabilities and shortcomings of artificial intelligence. And some of those businesses have actually concluded that they need more humans in the coming year, not fewer. I'm thinking of an accounting firm like Shellman, which is based in Tampa, Florida. They've got about 550 people right now

And their CEO Avni Desai told me she actually discovered they needed to hire seven people to do AI prompts. They're prompt engineers. They basically specialize in getting the most out of the AI software. And she's also looking to add another 35 people in the first half of this year and all kinds of roles, administration, accounting, etc.

leadership coaching, basically saying, look, AI has a lot of potential. It's going to be an efficiency for us down the line. But right now, it's actually costing us more to invest in AI than it is saving us money on the other end. So I don't know how comforting that is to listeners. Maybe AI is coming for the job at some point. But in the shorter run, I hear from some companies saying, actually, we still need to staff up. That's a way someone looking for work could benefit from AI if they have that experience and are able to bring that to the table.

It's that, and it's also in the job search process itself, can AI become more of an ally to you? When I talk to job seekers about AI, it's usually in the form of a complaint about, oh, the AI just threw my resume into a black hole. But when I talked to Chris Himes, who's the chief executive of Indeed recently, and he said, at some point this year, we're going to unveil this new tool called Pathfinder, and it's an AI talent agent. The idea is that this AI agent

will automatically put you in the applicant pool for jobs that you could be a good fit for and where you actually have a shot. The idea there, we'll see how it goes, but the idea there is to get to a human to human connection as quickly as possible. I like that phrase, we'll see how it goes, because I feel like that's what we're going to be applying to the job market for the rest of this year and

Yeah, it's very much a wait and see game, whether it's how AI is going to be used in the workplace. I wish I had that perfect crystal ball. I don't. But I did think it was encouraging to talk to people in staffing and company leaders and also job seekers recently and hear a greater sense of optimism than I have heard from them in quite a long time.

That's WSJ columnist Callum Borschers. And that's it for your Money Briefing. I'm Mariana Esbudo for The Wall Street Journal. This episode is produced by me with supervising producer Melanie Roy. Thanks for listening. ♪