Latest jobs report shows a white-collar hiring turnaround

The October jobs report, out Friday, looks rosy for a number of sectors. The U.S. economy added 165,000 new jobs last month, while unemployment ticked slightly down to 4.1%.

It’s another sign that strength in the U.S. economy is broadening, said Yelena Shulyatyeva, senior U.S. economist at The Conference Board.

“If you look at the labor market, you see strength in both goods and services producing sectors,” she said.

Manufacturing employment increased, for example.

Healthcare is another growing sector, said Andrew Flowers, chief economist at recruitment technology firm Appcast. He said that’s no surprise.

"[Healthcare] has been a stalwart industry for job growth,” he said. “The other is the kind of standing up, hard hat industries of transportation. All these industries that I would say related to the AI data center build out those add jobs as well.”

Still, there were some surprises in the jobs report.

“The third industry that added jobs — and it was such a surprise — is professional and business services. This is a real reversal of the white collar bloodbath we've seen over the past few years,” Flowers said.

Some of those new roles are also connected to AI, said Bill Driscoll with talent and consulting firm Robert Half.

“Where companies thought they might be able to replace folks with AI. Now, increasingly, they're they're wanting folks that can interact with AI and provide judgment [and] communication insights in conjunction with AI,” he said.

Driscoll is also seeing employers looking to fill corporate positions in security and data.

“Anytime you're seeing a lot of data work, that's cleaning up your data to prepare to be able to use AI, and then obviously security is a huge deal right now,” he said.

Those roles are more likely to be mid to higher level jobs. Though Driscoll said the entry level market is also loosening up a bit as companies think about their future workforce.