Holiday hiring: Look at job market & use of AI

It's time for the Holiday Hiring Rush. It's here. Local businesses are looking to fill seasonal positions, often with tight deadlines and limited resources. So what can businesses expect from this year's holiday job market? And how can AI help streamline the hiring process from reviewing resumes to filling positions faster? Joining us to talk all about this, Kyle M.K. with Indeed. Kyle, thanks for your time this morning. This is super important. We've reported on many companies, specifically UPS, kind of slowing their hiring for this season. Are you seeing that from Indeed or what's kind of the data telling us about the trend of hiring this holiday season? Yeah, great question, Katie. Seasonal hiring is actually off to a really strong start compared to last year, both in available job opportunities as well as job seeker interest. According to Indeed data, job postings are up 10% from last year, with job seeker interest in seasonal work up 28%. So what that means is for employers, starting your hiring conversations now is probably a good idea before the competition picks up closer to the holiday rush. And if you're not hiring yet, now's probably a good time to establish your plan and choose the right hiring tools. And then obviously for job seekers, check on Indeed pretty often as more seasonal jobs are added every day. Okay, that's promising that we're actually trending higher than last year. So people aren't trying to cut costs, people are still expected to spend a lot of money this holiday season. What are the biggest hiring hurdles that business owners face kind of when it's these seasonal hirings? AI do as well in this day and age to try to help companies hire faster. Yeah, great question. So right now, most businesses are falling into one of two categories. Either they are flooded with applications, or they're in the middle of a talent desert. Either way, it's just taking way too long for them to make a hire, especially if they're juggling just the everyday demands of running a business. So there's a number of AI-powered hiring tools out there now that can help a business of any size attract and find candidates, especially for urgent, time-sensitive, or hard-to-fill positions. And these hiring tools, like Indeed's premium sponsored jobs, can help employers find the right candidates faster with things like audience targeting and smarter matching. So from your data there at Indeed, is there a certain industry that's needing candidates more than others? If someone's at home watching this, they want a job, hey, look at this industry. Yeah, right now we see that retail and fulfillment type roles like loading and stocking are up this year. But retail, they make up 61 percent of all seasonal jobs. So if you're looking for a job, retail will probably you'll see a lot more of those jobs than not. It's hard to believe Black Friday is coming up. It's time to start thinking Christmas shopping. Kyle, thanks so much for your time. If you're a candidate, you need a job. Indeed.com. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.