Nobody is leaving and nobody is arriving. The August JOLTS release on Tuesday showed hires at 5.2 million, a 3.3 percent rate, and layoffs at their lowest since March 2025. Quits held at 3.1 million. An Indeed economist told SIA the mix of low hiring and even lower layoffs and quits keeps payrolls growing while making the market far less dynamic than it was a few years ago. Payroll growth with no churn is a market where everyone is waiting for someone else to blink.
Staying put has a price, and ADP priced it the next morning. Its September report counted 90,000 private-sector jobs, the most in three months, and put annual pay growth at 4.4 percent for people who kept their jobs and 7.3 percent for people who changed them. That is a 2.9-point penalty for loyalty, and most of the workforce is paying it. Employers pay a version of the same bill. A frozen requisition saves a salary this quarter and leaves the work with whoever is still in the building.
The ADP sample covers more than 26 million private-sector employees and is built with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
That work is going somewhere. The SIA-Bullhorn indicator has U.S. staffing hours at a year-to-date high for the week ending September 19, with professional staffing up 11 percent from a year ago and industrial up 15. Part of the weekly jump is the usual rebound after Labor Day. The year-over-year line is the number to watch. Office and clerical, the work software is best at absorbing, is down 8 percent. SIA’s Pulse survey separately posted its highest median revenue since late 2022.
That is not a hiring boom. It is a staffing model change, and the consolidation is following it: HeadFirst Global folded 11 brands into one and renamed itself Vertage last Thursday. I have sat through enough hiring freezes to know the work does not stop when the requisitions do. It routes to the nearest budget that will approve it. So who gets the call? The person who can start Monday and needs no ramp, which on most projects is someone who has done the job before.
MBO Partners counts 22 percent of the full-time U.S. workforce as independent this year, more than double the share in 2019. Of those, 78 percent plan to keep going, 77 percent are satisfied, and 5.8 million are earning six figures, up from 3 million in 2020. The report says this is a new story. Professionals are building lasting careers around independence.
Fine. Some of us had a head start. We were handed the word downsizing in 1993, the phrase free agent in 1997, and a business card that said Consultant in 2001. Nobody ran a study. We built a client list, bought our own health insurance, and learned that the invoice is the performance review. The rest of the market is catching up, and it is welcome to the line. The survey calls it a trend. Around here it is called Tuesday.