Potentially some positive news for the job market in all the gloom.
Finance, technology and consumer goods firms are hiring tens of thousands in the United States and other countries, according to data from professional networking site LinkedIn.
Across seven countries in North America, Europe and Asia, healthcare providers are among the busiest recruiters given the ongoing battle against Covid-19, LinkedIn said.
But lifestyle changes during lockdown are also driving demand for financial consultants, factory workers, animators and game designers, and delivery workers.
Overall, the hiring rate has plunged in the first quarter from the year-ago period, and in late April remains lower than a year ago across most countries surveyed by the platform.
But the data offers a glimmer of hope, with a gradual uptick in China where the coronavirus emerged last year and which leads the world in surfacing from a months-long lockdown.
LinkedIn, with over 690 million users worldwide, counts new hires when people add a new employer to their profile.
The rate is the number of new hires divided by the total number of LinkedIn members in a country.
The figures, tracked since mid-February, are not corroborated by official jobs data and do not represent the actual number of jobs in an economy. Government figures are usually released with a time-lag of several weeks.
Guy Berger, principal economist at LinkedIn in California, told Reuters:
We are confident that our data is directionally correct in that there has been a huge decline in hiring in the US and abroad.
According to the data, hiring in China plummeted 50% during the height of its coronavirus crisis in mid-February, compared with 12 months earlier.
Since restrictions were eased in early April, the hiring rate has inched up, and for the week ending 24 April was 3% lower than the same period in 2019.
Hiring in the US, UK, France and Italy – which lead the world in coronavirus-related deaths – remains hugely depressed, but is falling less rapidly than a few weeks ago as the countries pass the peak of their epidemics, LinkedIn said.
