More companies are rescinding their job offers in expectation of a possible recession. Is this the end of the great job boom? Katherine Bindley and Angela Yang report for the Wall Street Journal:
Businesses in several different industries are rescinding job offers they made just a few months ago, in a sign the tightest labor market in decades may be showing cracks.
Companies including Twitter Inc. , real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. , and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. have rescinded offers in recent weeks. Employers in other pockets of the economy are pulling away offers too, including some in insurance, retail marketing, consulting and recruiting services.
At the same time, many companies have signaled a more cautious hiring approach. Netflix Inc. , Peloton Interactive Inc. , Carvana Co. and others announced layoffs. Technology giants such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and Uber Technologies warned they will dial back hiring plans.
The labor market remains strong overall, with an unemployment rate at 3.6%, near the half-century low it reached in early 2020.
But these signs of caution in hiring show that executives are finding it tougher to predict the next 12 months in the economy, say hiring managers and recruiters. When a company revokes a job offer, it indicates a company’s business outlook has changed so quickly it has to undo hiring plans made sometimes weeks before.
“I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing—like it’s a job I had had lined up for months and I really was counting on it,” said Franco Salinas, 24 years old, who learned this month that a data-analyst position he planned to start in July had been axed. “This just made me realize how fragile things are.”
Some recruiterscaution that there hasn’t been a large wave of job offers canceled. At the same time, employers still can’t find enough workers for many types of jobs.
Yet, “going from zero to a fairly small amount seems like a big increase,” said Brian Kropp, vice president ofhuman-resources research for advisory firm Gartner.
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