Monthly Industry Spotlight: Retail

In this, the busiest week for holiday shopping, we thought we would do our monthly industry focus on the Retail sector. Retail job openings account for the second-largest number of job openings in the LinkUp job database at 19% for November 2017. Within Retail, job openings at General Merchandise stores, Clothing & Accessory stores and Misc. Retailers account for almost 50% of the job openings.

The share of job openings within each Retail sub-industry varies from Kroger, which only accounts for 12% of job openings in Food & Beverage stores, to Lowe’s which accounts for 58% of the job openings in Building Material & Garden stores.

Here at LinkUp, we frequently analyze sub-industries by comparing short-term job openings (“Momentum”) to long-term trends (“Growth”). In the Retail industry, specialty stores such as Health & Personal Care stores, Clothing & Accessory stores, and Misc. Retailers are showing stronger growth while the biggest sub-industry, General Merchandise stores, has had very little increase in job openings.

Although General Merchandise stores have not changed the number of job openings, these stores are able to fill their jobs faster than any other Retail sub-industry, measured by how long jobs are posted before they are taken off the company site (“job duration”).

On the other hand, Health & Personal Care stores take the longest to fill their job openings.