- New employment data shows what US hiring looks like across industries.
- Employment is thriving in different healthcare fields.
- Couriers and messengers have also added jobs.
If you're looking for work, you could consider applying for a healthcare or transportation job right now. But if you're considering applying to white-collar fields, it may be tougher to land a role.
New Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Friday showed that more people entered the labor force in March, contributing to a small uptick in unemployment. While newly unemployed Americans may be hopeful to land a job quickly, some people on the job market have struggled to find work. The number of people unemployed long term rose by 40,000 in March.
"If you've never had a problem getting a job before and suddenly you do, you can't look at it and think, 'I'm the problem,'" recruiter Kathleen Nolan recently told Business Insider. "You've got to look at what's going on around you."
The newly released data reveals where people have been getting hired so far this year.
Here are the industries that have been hiring
Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said the March jobs report showed strength in service and in-person work and less so in white-collar jobs or work that may be more likely to be done remotely.
Healthcare, which typically has in-person roles, has been a constant strength in the labor market, with consistently stronger gains over the past few years. There's an ongoing need for healthcare workers.
There is strength elsewhere in the US economy. Employment in the transportation and warehousing sector rose mainly due to gigs in couriers and messengers, which saw cooler job growth last year. Meanwhile, employment fell in warehousing and storage.
Dean Baker, senior economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the recent increase in couriers and messengers, which includes people delivering packages, "could reflect increased demand for items in advance of tariffs." President Donald Trump unveiled his latest tariff plan on April 2, which will impose a 10% tariff on countries and then a higher tariff on Japan, the European Union, and many other trade partners.
Stahle said construction's gain of 13,000 in March was "notable because when interest rates started to increase a couple of years ago, that was kind of the industry that everybody thought was going to break first, and yet we see that construction has continued to hold solid."
Employment increased by 24,000 in this sector from December to March. Associated Builders and Contractors said in a January press release that over 400,000 new construction workers are needed this year to meet demand.
Retail work saw employment rise over the month in March, but the BLS report on Friday said that an end of a strike contributed to that gain. The three-month employment increase showed general merchandise retailers saw the highest growth among the detailed types of retail work.
The three-month employment growth in healthcare was widespread across the sector. It increased by thousands in ambulatory healthcare services, which include doctors' offices and medical labs, while also increasing by thousands in hospitals.
While the federal government is making cuts, the numbers haven't largely been reflected in the BLS jobs report because of the timing of the surveys and people on paid leave, such as probationary workers who have been reinstated after a court order pausing their terminations, being counted as employed. For people still interested in working for the government, local government could be an area to look at, based on its most recent three-month job gain.
Amusement, gambling, and recreation industries were one group within the leisure and hospitality that saw recent strength. Michael Feroli, JPMorgan's chief US economist, said that similar to the construction sector, "leisure and hospitality may have benefited from better seasonally adjusted weather conditions."
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