White-Collar Hiring Weakens While Health and Care Jobs Grow
Across the US and EU, office-job openings are shrinking and wage growth is slowing, even as health and care roles keep headline employment numbers looking solid.
Work News | New Stardom
Trend Analysis
Photo by Vitaly Gariev
In the United States, the latest jobs report showed 130,000 new positions in January 2026 and an unemployment rate that still looks benign at 4.3%. Most of those gains came from health care and social assistance, which together added more than 60% of the new jobs, while revisions cut total 2025 job growth down to just 181,000 – the weakest year of expansion since the pandemic.
Federal payrolls have been shrinking, and sectors such as finance and other white-collar services have been losing jobs or, at best, holding flat. That pattern fits what employers have been signalling for months, hiring plans are being pared back in non-frontline roles while hospitals, clinics and care providers keep recruiting to meet demographic demand.
The US Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey shows openings falling to 6.5 million in December 2025, the lowest level since September 2020. The job-openings rate has slipped to 3.9%, down from 4.5% a year earlier, and the decline is particularly sharp in professional and business services – the broad category that covers many white-collar roles. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job openings in that sector fell again in December, even as quits and layoffs remained relatively stable.
Market commentators digging into the same dataset estimate that there are now only about 1.6 job openings per 100 employees in professional and business services, the lowest level in at least eleven years. That ratio does not measure unemployment directly, but it does capture how thin the margin of unfilled roles has become in core office occupations compared with the post-pandemic boom. The combination of fewer openings and longer searches helps explain the rise of “reverse recruiting,” where candidates pay agencies to run high-volume, tailored applications and manage their LinkedIn outreach, effectively outsourcing the administrative and networking work of job hunting because the process has become so slow.
Europe is moving in the same direction, though with less dramatic numbers as Eurostat data show the job-vacancy rate in the euro area falling from 2.5% in the third quarter of 2024 to 2.1% in the third quarter of 2025, and in the EU from 2.3% to 2.0% over the same period. That points to cooling labour demand in Europe, although the shifts are smaller than the declines seen in US white-collar job openings. Recruiters in major markets report softer demand for consulting, finance and corporate-services roles, even as health, social care and specialised technical jobs continue to hire.
In the UK recent data show the unemployment rate rising to 5.2% in late 2025, the highest in nearly five years, with youth unemployment hitting 14%. Wage growth has slowed sharply, with regular pay up 4.2% year-on-year, and real wages up less than 1% once inflation is accounted for. That combination of higher unemployment and weaker pay growth mirrors, on a smaller scale, what US data is signalling for white-collar workers.
Alongside the cyclical slowdown, there is a structural layer since generative AI and automation are already reshaping demand for office-based roles, particularly in legal, administrative and support functions. Law firms and corporates in Europe and North America have announced restructurings that explicitly link business-services job cuts to increased use of AI or to consolidating support work in lower-cost hubs. The result is not a blanket collapse in white-collar employment, but a narrower set of entry-level openings and slower internal progression than in the last expansion.
Taken together, the signals describe a labour market that still creates jobs overall, but feels significantly harsher for office workers than headline unemployment figures suggest. Health and care roles are carrying much of the growth, while professional vacancies shrink, searches lengthen and wage growth decelerates. Workers are responding in expected ways: holding onto existing roles for longer, delaying moves that once felt routine, or paying out of pocket for help navigating corporate hiring systems.
Whether this ultimately meets a technical definition of “white-collar recession” is less important than what it implies for policy and corporate practice. For governments, weaker vacancy rates and slower wage growth in professional roles argue for strengthening unemployment support, retraining in AI-complementary skills and careful monitoring of paid job-search services that risk turning access to employers into a pay-to-play system. For employers, the numbers are a reminder that the apparent ease of hiring today comes with longer-term costs if a generation of graduates and mid-career workers see fewer paths into stable, skilled office work.
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