This Is The Industry with The Most Job Openings

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 26, 8:48AM EST

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This Is The Industry with The Most Job Openings — © RiverNorthPhotography / iStock Unreleased via Getty Images

The number of unfilled jobs in America is extremely high. One reason is that people are quitting their jobs at record levels. That figure hit 4.4 million in September. And the figures are amazing high in some states. In Hawaii, 7.1% of the working population quit jobs two months ago.

The jobs situation is much worse for employers in several industries. Low-paid openings go unfilled. A place that pays low hourly wages like restaurants is desperate for new employees. Even McDonald’s has trouble.

So many Americans have been quitting their jobs this year that the term “Great Resignation” has been coined to describe this unprecedented exodus from the workplace.

One reason for this may be that workers decided to wait out Covid-19 before quitting jobs they were lucky enough to have as millions of others lost their jobs last year during the worst months of the pandemic. As the country began to recover, these and other workers left jobs in search of higher wages, better benefits and, for many, more flexibility in working from home.

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Which industry is hiring the most these days? To find out, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the rate of job openings plus the total number of job openings across 19 key industry categories. Figures are for the number of job openings on the last business day of the most recent month for which figures are available, May 31, 2021, as a percentage of total employment. Parallel numbers are given for May 2020 for comparison.

The industry with the most job openings is Accommodation and food services. Here are the details:

> Job opening rate in May 2021: 9.1% (total: 1,248,000)
> Total employment + job openings in May 2021: 13,669,000
> Job opening rate in May 2020: 6.6% (total: 627,000)
> Total employment + job openings in May 2020: 9,549,100

Click here to read Industries With The Most Job Openings

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.