Job Market April 2025: Sector & Regional Shifts, Remote Stability

Aura’s Workforce Intelligence Reveals a Fragmented, Sector-Sensitive Market

• National hiring is stabilizing, but growth is highly uneven across states and industries.

• Top job growth by state: Rhode Island (+8.3%), Montana (+7.4%), Delaware (+6.6%), New Hampshire (+6.4%).

• Job declines in key markets: Texas (-2.6%), Florida (-5.3%), New York (-1.5%), Georgia (-1.2%).

• Sector momentum:

  • 📈 Up: Hospitality (+13%), HR (+8%), Automotive (+5%), Financial Services (+4%)

  • 📉 Down: Staffing & Recruiting (-7%), Healthcare (-3%)

• Remote work has leveled off at just under 6% of job postings — indicating long-term hybrid normalization.

• Remote job growth is concentrated in tech, digital services, and hospitality, while care-driven roles saw declines.

Aura's April 2025 US job market report, with data through March, reveals a labor landscape shaped by regional inconsistency and shifting sectoral momentum.

While total job postings remained relatively stable at the national level, Aura’s real-time data surfaced surprising state-level trends — with job growth increasingly concentrated in smaller, less traditional markets, and uneven recovery patterns across sectors like healthcare, staffing, and services.

Recent data from ADP backs up this nuanced view, highlighting similar signs of pocketed growth and sector-specific resilience, particularly in professional services and manufacturing.

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Global Overview: APAC Leads, US Slows

Aura’s global job posting trends showed strong momentum in Asia-Pacific (+14%), while Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) posted mixed results, and Latin America recorded a notable +13% increase, driven in large part by a 28% surge in Mexico. North America saw a marginal decline (-1%), reflecting stable but subdued hiring momentum across the U.S. and Canada.

State-Level Trends: Uneven Growth, With Surprising Leaders

Aura’s April 2025 job postings data show a fragmented labor landscape, with 26 states recording job posting increases, while 24 states and the District of Columbia saw declines. It's a complex and mixed state-by-state labor landscape, with traditional powerhouses like Texas (-2.6%), Florida (-5.3%), and New York (-1.5%) seeing notable declines in job postings. Even Washington (-0.3%) and Georgia (-1.2%), saw job listings slip in March.

By contrast, smaller and mid-sized states led the way in percentage job growth. Rhode Island posted the strongest gain at +8.3%, followed by Montana (+7.4%), Delaware (+6.6%), and New Hampshire (+6.4%). Even Minnesota (+5.2%) and West Virginia (+4.0%) saw meaningful growth, bucking regional norms.

California recorded a +1.25% increase, showing modest resilience, but it was far from the top performers. Similarly, Illinois (+1.2%), North Carolina (+1.18%), and Colorado (+2.9%) all contributed incremental gains, though none enough to offset the broader declines seen across the South and West.

This paints a picture of geographic fragmentation, one where job growth is no longer concentrated in coastal giants, but increasingly showing up in less obvious places. Aura’s real-time view offers a more granular and actionable understanding of how and where labor demand is shifting, often in ways national data averages can’t detect until much later.

Sector View: Service Rebound vs Staffing Slump

In terms of sector trends, Aura detected strong job posting increases in:

• Hospitality (+13%)

• Human Resources (+8%)

• Automotive (+5%)

• Financial Services (+4%)

Meanwhile, Staffing & Recruiting (-7%) and Healthcare (-3%) saw declines.

ADP's data showed that Professional & Business Services and Financial Activities are the strongest hiring sectors, adding 57,000 and 38,000 jobs respectively, which align closely with Aura’s upward trend in internal hiring and service-sector resilience.

Remote Work: From Spike to Stability

After seasonal volatility, remote job postings appear to be stabilizing. Aura reports that remote listings have held just under 6% of total jobs, showing consistent employer demand for flexibility. Despite peak hiring months in October and January, the trend has smoothed out, suggesting long-term adoption of hybrid and remote-friendly roles.

Remote Work by Industry: Where It's Growing and Where It’s Not

Aura’s data reveals that remote-friendly gains were concentrated in:

• IT & Services

• Computer Software

• Hospitality

Conversely, roles in Mental Healthcare, Research, and Pharma saw reductions in remote job availability.

ADP Pay Insights: Wage Growth Slows, but Remains Healthy

While Aura focuses on labor market dynamics, ADP adds useful context on pay trends. Their data shows:

• 4.6% year-over-year pay growth for job-stayers

• 6.5% for job-changers—a declining premium, now tied with a record low

Notably, manufacturing and financial activities reported some of the strongest pay increases.

What It All Means: Stay Local, Stay Granular

Viewed together, Aura and ADP data paint a picture of a moderately expanding labor market that conceals significant internal contradictions and asymmetries:

• Job growth is no longer concentrated in coastal hubs. Smaller states like Rhode Island (+8.3%), Montana (+7.4%), and Delaware (+6.6%) are driving gains, while larger economies like Texas, Florida, and New York are seeing slowdowns.

• Financial services, HR, and professional services remain resilient, while healthcare, education, and staffing sectors are under pressure due to policy and budget shifts.

• Remote work is stabilizing at just under 6% of total postings, signaling long-term hybrid adoption rather than continued acceleration.

• Wage growth is decelerating, but still outpaces inflation, raising concerns about potential stickiness, particularly if hiring slows further.

National labor stats may offer broad context, but real strategy happens at the local and functional level. Whether you're advising clients, managing portfolios, or adjusting headcount, outside-in visibility into workforce dynamics is now a strategic advantage—and Aura is built to deliver it.

April Labor Market Context: Slower Hiring, Shifting Signals, and the Need for Granular Insight

As the April jobs report looms, consensus expectations point to a slowing but still growing labor market, with headline job growth expected to land near 125,000 new nonfarm payrolls, down from 151,000 in February, per FactSet. At the same time, the unemployment rate is forecast to tick up to 4.2%, its highest level in a year, raising questions about the strength of the U.S. economy amid inflation pressures, tariffs, and looming federal workforce cuts.

These figures, to be released soon by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), will be watched closely by both investors and Federal Reserve policymakers. With the central bank holding interest rates steady, Fed officials have signaled openness to interest rate cuts later in 2025, but only if labor market conditions permit it. That makes this employment situation particularly pivotal.

Adding to the complexity is the mixed impact of government jobs: despite announcements of mass federal layoffs with the DOGE initiative, court orders and severance delays mean many cuts won’t appear in the labor department’s household survey.

Aura’s real-time insights further contextualize these macro signals. The platform’s data shows modest job creation in financial services, HR, and automotive, while industries like health care, staffing, and recruiting saw notable pullbacks, aligning with economist forecasts of softness due to DEI cuts, Medicaid-related budget tightening, and reduced leisure and hospitality demand.

Meanwhile, average hourly earnings are projected to rise 0.3%, matching February’s pace. However, if wage growth continues to outpace employment gains, some economists warn that it could signal stagflation risk. 

Aura’s proprietary data can provide an early lens on such mismatches, particularly by revealing how job openings, labor turnover, and sectoral hiring rates evolve before they appear in BLS releases. And while the employment-population ratio and labor force participation rate are expected to hold steady, Aura helps decode whether this stability masks discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force altogether, something traditional reports often miss until it's too late.

The April snapshot reinforces a key truth: headline numbers can’t capture what’s actually happening under the surface. With borrowing costs, tariff uncertainty, and social assistance program adjustments all in play, leaders need high-resolution visibility into real labor dynamics. Aura fills the gap: giving clients real-time job market signals, functional hiring breakdowns, and peer benchmarking across 20 million companies, which is something BLS data or Wall Street consensus can’t replicate.

Aura’s outside-in platform, powered by over 1 billion workforce data points, provides dynamic benchmarks and competitive intelligence that can’t be gleaned from macro reporting or internal HR systems alone. The edge lies in granular, external data for strategic planning, workforce transformation, or investment analysis—an edge Aura is built to deliver.

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