IHL’s new Hiring Demand Index offers weekly read on retail, hospitality hiring
Store operations roles accounted for more than half of all open retail postings in the week ending Oct. 11, and seasonal and holiday roles rose to 7.4% of postings as retailers staff up for the holidays.
That’s according to IHL Group’s new Hiring Demand Index, a weekly measure of hiring demand across the retail and hospitality industries. The index offers a weekly view of where frontline labor demand is building and which roles are in short supply. It tracks open job postings at retail and hospitality companies representing 942,937 stores in the United States, Canada and Europe.
Below are some highlights for the week ending Oct. 11:
•Store floor jobs lead hiring. Store operations accounts for 55.6% of all open postings with an identifiable job type, the largest group by a wide margin. Many are leadership roles: roughly one-in=four store postings with a stated job level is for a manager or above (24.6%).
•Restaurant and kitchen roles are the second-largest area of hiring, at 13.7% of those postings, followed by transportation and delivery at 7.2%.
•Technology roles make up 0.8% of those postings. Technology postings fell 0.7% on the week but rose 3.1% over the past four weeks, a pause in a four-week climb.
•Among the 78% of technology postings that include a full job description, SQL appears in 21%, Python in 21% and CI/CD in 16%. Agentic AI appears in 5% of them.
•During the past four weeks, store operations postings moved most, up 13.1%, while restaurant and kitchen postings rose 0.9%. Store postings and the share of seasonal roles rose together over the month, with seasonal roles moving from 2.1% to 7.4% of open postings, which points to holiday staffing behind the store-floor gains.
•Over the past four weeks the index is up 1.3 %, little changed over the month.
“Retailers and restaurant operators make staffing and technology decisions months before the official labor data catches up,” said Greg Buzek, president of IHL Group. “The Hiring Demand Index allows the industry to see where the opportunities are and gives them a weekly read on where demand is actually building. Right now that’s the store floor, with seasonal hiring well under way.”
[READ MORE: Retailers’ holiday hiring plans challenged by shifts in the candidate pool]
The HDI is built from IHL Group's Sophia job-postings panel. Each week it reports the following:
•Overall hiring demand, indexed to June 7, = 100, with a four-week average that smooths out single- week swings;
•Hiring by job function, including store operations, restaurant and kitchen, and technology roles;
•The share of open postings for seasonal and holiday roles; and
•Regional trends for the United States, Canada and Europe.
Each company is compared only with itself from one week to the next, so companies joining or leaving the panel do not move the index. The HDI measures open job postings, not completed hires.
“Open job postings show where employers plan to add people before those hires appear in government payroll data,” IHL said. “That makes the HDI a leading read on the direction of retail and hospitality employment, ahead of official releases.”
The full first issue, with exhibits by job function and region, the comparison with official labor statistics and the methodology, is available here. New issues are published every Monday.
