Private sector employers added 692,000 jobs in June, according to payroll giant ADP, in a further sign of economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Small businesses accounted for 215,000 of the jobs, including 93,000 in businesses with between one and 19 employees, and 122,000 in businesses with 20 to 49 employees, according to the
The job numbers indicated strong hiring gains, especially in the leisure and hospitality area, as more Americans dine out and travel while states roll back their COVID-19 restrictions, thanks to the wide availability of vaccines, although the continuing spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant is causing concern. Another concern is finding employees to fill all the open positions after many businesses laid off staff last year at the height of the pandemic. More than 2.7 million open jobs in the restaurant industry, for example, remain unfilled, but the constraints have shifted from lack of demand to lack of supply.
“Businesses are looking to staff up quickly,” said ADP chief economist Nela Richardson during a press conference Wednesday. “That’s understandable after so many months of reduced capacity. But they’re having trouble filling openings as quickly as they would like. In fact, in a recently conducted small business survey by the ADP Research Institute, hiring was rated as the top challenge for firms with less than 50 employees. We think that challenge is also present in larger firms as well.”
While payrolls remain nearly 7 million short of pre-COVID-19 levels, she noted, job gains have totaled approximately 3 million since the start of this year.
