Layoffs and Job Reductions

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    Meta Is Said to Plan Significant Job Cuts This Week

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    Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said last month that many “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year” as his company faces economic challenges.SAN FRANCISCO — Meta plans to lay off employees this week, three people with knowledge of the situation said, adding that the job cuts were set to be the most significant at the company since it was founded in 2004.It was unclear how many people would be cut and in which departments, said the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The layoffs were expected by the end of the week. Meta had 87,314 employees at the end of September, up 28 percent from a year ago.Meta has been struggling financially for months and has been increasingly clamping down on costs. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has spent billions of dollars on the emerging technology of the metaverse, an immersive online world, just as the global economy has slowed and inflation has soared.At the same time, digital advertising — which forms the bulk of Meta’s revenue — has weakened as advertisers have pulled back, affecting many social media companies. Meta’s business has also been hurt by privacy changes that Apple enacted, which have hampered the ability of many apps to target mobile ads to users.Last month, Meta posted a 50 percent slide in quarterly profits and its second straight sales decline. The company said at the time that it would be “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently,” including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.More on Big TechMusk’s Twitter Takeover: Elon Musk has moved quickly to overhaul Twitter since he completed his $44 billion buyout of the company. But can he make the math work?Big Tech’s Slowdown: Amid stubborn inflation and rising interest rates, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech companies are signaling that tough days may be ahead. Some have already announced hiring freezes and job cuts.App Store Battle: Spotify wants to get into the audiobooks business, but Apple has rejected its new app three times. The standoff is the latest in a series of confrontations between the companies.Inside Meta’s Struggles: After a rocky year, employees at Meta are expressing skepticism, confusion and frustration over Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, had added that most “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” He said the company would “end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Meta’s plans for layoffs this week.Mr. Zuckerberg has been signaling tougher times ahead for months. In July, he told employees that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. Their performances would also be graded more intensely than previously, he said.“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Mr. Zuckerberg told employees in a call at the time. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”Meta joins other tech companies that have been laying off employees as economic conditions have grown more challenging. Tech companies boomed during the coronavirus pandemic but many of the largest firms reported financial results in recent weeks that showed they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters.On Friday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, laid off half of the company’s staff. Last week, Lyft also said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase are among other companies that have announced job cuts this year.Other tech companies are freezing their hiring. Last week, Amazon said it had decided to pause incremental corporate hiring because the economy was “in an uncertain place.” The move added to a freeze from last month, when the e-commerce giant halted corporate and technology hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year. More

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    Elon Musk Begins Layoffs at Twitter

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    The social media company’s 7,500 employees have been bracing for job cuts since Mr. Musk took it over last week.SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk will begin laying off Twitter employees on Friday, culling the social media company’s 7,500-person work force a little over a week after completing his blockbuster buyout.Twitter employees were notified in a company-wide email that the layoffs were set to begin, according to a copy of the message seen by The New York Times. About half the company’s workers appeared set to lose their jobs, according to internal messages and an investor, though the final count may take time to become clear. The email instructed Twitter employees to go home and not return to the offices on Friday as the cuts proceeded. Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Oct. 27 and immediately fired its chief executive and other top managers. More executives have since resigned or were let go, while managers were asked to draw up lists of high- and low-performing employees, likely with an eye toward job cuts.Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, faces pressure to make Twitter work financially. The deal was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. The billionaire also loaded about $13 billion in debt on Twitter for the acquisition and is on the hook to pay about $1 billion a year in interest payments. But Twitter has often lost money, and its cash flow is not robust. Mr. Musk may benefit from cutting costs so the company is less expensive to operate.Twitter’s layoffs are unlikely to be the largest in the tech industry by total number. The computer manufacturer HP cut 24,600 of its employees, about 7.5 percent, in 2008. It later cut tens of thousands more, reaching about 30 percent of its work force.Elon Musk’s Acquisition of TwitterCard 1 of 8A blockbuster deal. More

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    Job Openings Rose in September Despite Higher Interest Rates

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    The labor market has remained stronger than expected even as the Federal Reserve has tried to get inflation under control.The nation’s extreme shortage of job seekers worsened in September, the Labor Department reported Tuesday, after easing the previous month.Employers had 10.7 million positions open as summer ended, up from 10.3 million in August. That left roughly 1.9 posted jobs for every unemployed worker, a persistently high ratio even as the economy appears to be decelerating because the Federal Reserve is working to quell inflation.Pulling down job postings — or holding off on new ones — is usually the first step that employers take as the economy weakens, in hopes that hiring more conservatively could avoid the need to lay people off later. But the labor market has been slow to respond to rising interest rates, even as other indicators point toward an impending recession.The report is the last piece of significant economic data to land before policymakers at the Fed meet on Wednesday, and only reinforces the likely outcome. Most analysts expect the central bank to raise its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percentage points, even if job openings tumbled in Tuesday’s Labor Department report.“What if all the JOLTS dropped to zero?” said Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board, using shorthand for the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. “I don’t think that would cause them to not go 75 basis points, because they’re focused on inflation. They’ve already said there’s going to be some pain, and pain is code for the labor market.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.September Jobs Report: Job growth eased slightly in September but remained robust, indicating that the economy was maintaining momentum despite higher interest rates.A Cooling Market?: Unemployment is low and hiring is strong, but there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.A Feast or Famine Career: America’s port truck drivers are a nearly-invisible yet crucial part of the global supply chain. And they are sinking into desperation.The number of open jobs is consistent with surveys of businesses, which have continued to report difficulty hiring. The National Federation of Independent Business found in its September survey that 23 percent of its members planned to create new jobs in the next three months, and of those, 89 percent said they had few qualified applicants.The jump in job openings was largely due to huge increases at hotels and restaurants, which added 215,000 postings. And the health care and social assistance sector was looking for 115,000 more workers than the previous month, reaching 2.1 million openings total, the highest level on record.At the same time, the number of people hired declined to about 6.1 million, continuing a downward slide that began this spring. That could be a consequence of employers having a tougher time finding qualified applicants, or deciding to hold positions open longer as they wait for the economic dust to settle.The number of people quitting their jobs voluntarily, usually a sign that workers have confidence they’ll be able to find a better one, declined slightly to about 4.1 million. As a share of total employment, that was about level with recent months but down from record highs at the end of 2021.Inflation has forced some workers to find ways to increase their earnings — whether by asking for raises or finding other jobs. At the same time, fear of a looming recession has prompted some workers to stay put unless they have another offer in hand.Quitting fell most in industries that are facing the strongest headwinds from higher interest rates and weakening consumer spending, including construction, transportation and warehousing, and manufacturing.The number of layoffs also declined from recent months. That’s in line with the weekly reports of initial claims for unemployment insurance, which have remained near record lows. After hiring aggressively over the past year — and often at higher salaries — employers may be less eager to let people go, even as business wavers.In an August survey of hiring managers by the polling firm Morning Consult, about 57 percent of respondents said they were retaining more employees than they normally would because of how difficult it was to replace people. That may lead to a reversal of the typical “last-in, first-out” pattern that has been common in other downturns.“If you spent a lot of money attracting workers, you don’t want to let them go right away, because then all that money just goes down the drain,” Ms. Peterson said. “Six months later you have to find them again, and they might be asking for a different asking price. You want to keep all your talent, but if you think about it, it’s very expensive to let go of those workers you just hired and invested a lot in.” More

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    Labor Hoarding Could be Good News for the Economy

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    PROVO, Utah — Chad Pritchard and his colleagues are trying everything to staff their pizza shop and bistro, and as they do, they have turned to a new tactic: They avoid firing employees at all costs.Infractions that previously would have led to a quick dismissal no longer do at the chef’s two places, Fat Daddy’s Pizzeria and Bistro Provenance. Consistent transportation issues have ceased to be a deal breaker. Workers who show up drunk these days are sent home to sober up.Employers in Provo, a college town at the base of the Rocky Mountains where unemployment is near the lowest in the nation at 1.9 percent, have no room to lose workers. Bistro Provenance, which opened in September, has been unable to hire enough employees to open for lunch at all, or for dinner on Sundays and Mondays. The workers it has are often new to the industry, or young: On a recent Wednesday night, a 17-year-old could be found torching a crème brûlée.Down the street, Mr. Pritchard’s pizza shop is now relying on an outside cleaner to help his thin staff tidy up. And up and down the wide avenue that separates the two restaurants, storefronts display “Help Wanted” signs or announce that the businesses have had to temporarily reduce their hours.Provo’s desperation for workers is an intense version of the labor crunch that has plagued employers nationwide over the past two years — one that has prompted changes in hiring and layoff practices that could have big implications for the U.S. economy. Policymakers are hoping that after struggling through the worst labor shortages America has experienced in at least several decades, employers will be hesitant to lay off workers even when the economy cools.Mr. Pritchard cannot hire enough employees to open the bistro for lunch at all, or for dinner on Sundays or Mondays.That may help prevent the kind of painful recession the Federal Reserve is hoping to avoid as it tries to combat persistent inflation. America’s economy is facing a marked — and intentional — slowdown as the Fed raises interest rates to chill demand and drive down price increases, the kind of pullback that would usually result in notably higher unemployment. But officials are still hoping to achieve a soft landing in which growth moderates without causing widespread job losses. A few have speculated that today’s staffing woes will help them to pull it off, as companies try harder than they have in the past to weather a slowdown without cutting staff.“Businesses that experienced unprecedented challenges restoring or expanding their work forces following the pandemic may be more inclined to make greater efforts to retain their employees than they normally would when facing a slowdown in economic activity,” Lael Brainard, the Fed’s vice chair, said in a recent speech. “This may mean that slowing aggregate demand will lead to a smaller increase in unemployment than we have seen in previous recessions.”For now, the job market remains strong. Employers added 263,000 workers in September, fewer than in recent months but more than was normal before the pandemic. Unemployment is at 3.5 percent, matching the lowest level in 50 years, and average hourly earnings picked up at a solid 5 percent clip compared with a year earlier.But that is expected to change. When the Fed raises interest rates and slows down the economy, it also weakens the labor market. Wage gains slow, paving the way for inflation to cool down, and in the process, unemployment rises — potentially, significantly.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.September Jobs Report: Job growth eased slightly in September but remained robust, indicating that the economy was maintaining momentum despite higher interest rates.A Cooling Market?: Unemployment is low and hiring is strong, but there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.Factory Jobs: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed during the pandemic — and then some.Missing Workers: The labor market appears hot, but the supply of labor has fallen short, holding back the economy. Here is why.In the 1980s, when inflation was faster than it is now and entrenched, the Fed lifted rates drastically to roughly 20 percent and sent unemployment to above 10 percent. Few economists expect an outcome that severe this time since today’s inflation burst has been shorter-lived and rates are not expected to climb nearly as much.Mr. Pritchard demonstrated how to stretch pizza dough in Fat Daddy’s Pizzeria, his other restaurant in Provo.Many of the workers Mr. Pritchard and his business partner, Janine Coons, have hired are new to the industry or young.Still, Fed officials themselves expect unemployment to rise nearly a full percentage point to 4.4 percent next year — and policymakers have admitted that is a mild estimate, given how much they are trying to slow down the economy. Some economists have penciled in worse outcomes. Deutsche Bank, for instance, predicts 5.6 percent joblessness by the end of 2023.Labor hoarding offers a glimmer of hope that could help the Fed’s more benign unemployment forecast to become reality: Employers who are loath to jettison workers may help the labor market to slow down and wage growth to moderate without a spike in joblessness.“Companies are still confronting this enormous churn and losing people, and they don’t know what to do to hang on to people,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at the career site ZipRecruiter. “They’re definitely hanging on to workers for dear life just because they’re so scarce.”When the job market slows, employers will have recent, firsthand memories of how expensive it can be to recruit, and train, workers. Many employers may enter the slowdown still severely understaffed, particularly in industries like leisure and hospitality that have struggled to hire and retain workers since the start of the pandemic. Those factors may make them less likely to institute layoffs.And after long months of very tight labor markets — there are still nearly two open jobs for every unemployed worker — companies may be hesitant to believe that any uptick in worker availability will last.“There’s a lot of uncertainty about how big of a downturn are we facing,” said Benjamin Friedrich, an associate professor of strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “You kind of want to be ready when opportunities arise. The way I think about labor hoarding is, it has option value.”Employers in Provo, where unemployment is near the lowest in the nation at 1.9 percent, have no room to lose workers.Instead of firing, businesses may look for other ways to trim costs. Mr. Pritchard in Provo and his business partner, Janine Coons, said that if business fell off, their first resort would be to cut hours. Their second would be taking pay cuts themselves. Firing would be a last resort.The pizzeria didn’t lay off workers during the pandemic, but Mr. Pritchard and Ms. Coons witnessed how punishing it can be to hire — and since all of their competitors have been learning the same lesson, they do not expect them to let go of their employees easily even if demand pulls back.“People aren’t going to fire people,” Mr. Pritchard said.But economists warned that what employers think they will do before a slowdown and what they actually do when they start to experience financial pain could be two different things.The idea that a tight labor market may leave businesses gun-shy about layoffs is untested. Some economists said that they could not recall any other downturn where employers broadly resisted culling their work force.“It would be a pretty notable change to how employers responded in the past,” said Nick Bunker, director of North American economic research for the career site Indeed.And even if they do not fire their full-time employees, companies have been making increased use of temporary or just-in-time help in recent months. Gusto, a small-business payroll and benefits platform, conducted an analysis of its clients and found that the ratio of contractors per employee had increased more than 60 percent since 2019.If the economy slows, gigs for those temporary workers could dry up, prompting them to begin searching for full-time jobs — possibly causing unemployment or underemployment to rise even if nobody is officially fired.Policymakers know a soft landing is a long shot. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, acknowledged during his last news conference that the Fed’s own estimate of how much unemployment might rise in a downturn was a “modest increase in the unemployment rate from a historical perspective, given the expected decline in inflation.”But he also added that “we see the current situation as outside of historical experience.”Bistro Provenance opened in September.Dinner service at the restaurant.The reasons for hope extend beyond labor hoarding. Because job openings are so unusually high right now, policymakers hope that workers can move into available positions even if some firms do begin layoffs as the labor market slows. Companies that have been desperate to hire for months — like Utah State Hospital in Provo — may swoop in to pick up anyone who is displaced.Dallas Earnshaw and his colleagues at the psychiatric hospital have been struggling mightily to hire enough nurse’s aides and other workers, though raising pay and loosening recruitment standards have helped around the edges. Because he cannot hire enough people to expand in needed ways, Mr. Earnshaw is poised to snap up employees if the labor market cools.“We’re desperate,” Mr. Earnshaw said.But for the moment, workers remain hard to find. At the bistro and pizza shop in downtown Provo, what worries Mr. Pritchard is that labor will become so expensive that — combined with rapid ingredient inflation — it will be hard or impossible to make a profit without lifting prices on pizzas or prime rib so much that consumers cannot bear the change.“What scares me most is not the economic slowdown,” he said. “It’s the hiring shortage that we have.” More

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    U.S. Job Growth Eases, but Is Too Strong to Suit Investors

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    The gain of 263,000 was shy of recent monthly totals but still robust. Stocks fell on fears of a harder, longer Fed campaign to fight inflation.Job growth eased slightly in September but remained robust, indicating that the economy was maintaining momentum despite higher interest rates. But the strong showing left many investors unhappy because they saw signs that the fight against inflation may become tougher and more prolonged.Employers added 263,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said Friday, a decline from 315,000 in August. The number was the lowest since April 2021 but still solid by prepandemic standards. The unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, equaling a five-decade low.“If I had just woken up from a really long nap and seen these numbers, I would conclude that we still have one of the strongest job markets that we’ve ever enjoyed,” said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust.Officials at the Federal Reserve have been keeping a close eye on hiring and wages as they proceed with a series of rate increases meant to combat inflation. The job data indicates that, for now, they are doing so without tipping the economy into a recession that would throw millions out of work.But it also increases the prospect that the effort to subdue price increases will be more extended. For investors, that came as bad news, since higher interest rates raise costs for companies and weigh on stock prices.The S&P 500 recorded its worst one-day performance since mid-September, falling 2.8 percent and eroding gains from earlier in the week.Fed officials have signaled in speeches this week that they remain resolute in trying to wrestle inflation lower, and that they are waiting for clear evidence that the economy is headed back toward price stability before they pull back.Wage growth has subsided somewhat, at least compared with the trend a year ago. Average hourly earnings climbed 5 percent from a year earlier, roughly matching economists’ expectations but slowing down slightly from the prior annual reading.Wages are still growing, but less rapidly in some sectorsPercent change in earnings for nonmanagers since January 2019 by sector More

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    Job Openings Fell in August, but Turnover Was Little Changed

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    Government data showed 10.1 million openings, a decline from 11.2 million in July. Overall hiring, quitting and layoffs were fairly steady.Employers continued to ease off the number of jobs they were hiring for in August, but not by much, adding to the picture of a labor market that’s cooling but still short of available workers.About 10.1 million positions were open at the end of the summer, down from 11.2 million in July, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. That still left 1.7 unemployed workers for each available job, around the highest proportion on record.The job openings rate — calculated by dividing the number of job openings by the sum of employment and open jobs — was 6.2 percent, down from a revised 6.8 percent in July. The number and share of people being hired and leaving their jobs remained about level.Federal Reserve officials have theorized that rather than prompting employers to lay people off, rising interest rates would instead subdue the economy by simply reducing their need for additional workers. So far, that’s happening — but very slowly.“Our perspective is really distorted,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm KPMG. “It’s still not anything like what we saw prepandemic. It’s cooling from a boil to a rolling simmer. And that’s not enough.”Ms. Swonk referred to data released by the job search website Indeed, which shows a consistently elevated level of new job postings, even though demand for retail workers in particular has leveled off.“They’ve come off their peak, but they’re still plateauing at a high level,” Ms. Swonk said. The share of people quitting their jobs is also an indicator of workers’ confidence that employment opportunities abound. About 4.2 million people gave notice in August, slightly more than during the previous month. That left the rate of people quitting their jobs — the number of people voluntarily leaving their jobs divided by total employment — only slightly below the 3 percent it reached at the end of last year, the highest reading on record.One of the largest drops in openings came in the financial sector, where mortgage brokers have been losing work as rising interest rates are subduing the housing market, although openings in rental and leasing activities rose. Retail openings also dropped, as companies prepared for a softer holiday season.Even while slowing down job postings, companies have been holding on to workers. After rising slightly in the first half of the year, the number of initial claims for unemployment has been trending lower since midsummer as employers have tried to stay fully staffed. In the release by the Labor Department on Tuesday, layoffs ticked up slightly to 1.5 million in August, but remained lower than their historical average.“Simply put, companies slashed payrolls by more than was necessary during the height of the pandemic and are struggling to restore staffing levels to where they were before Covid-19 hit,” Bob Schwartz, an Oxford Economics senior economist, wrote in a note last week. More

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    Less Turnover, Smaller Raises: Hot Job Market May Be Losing Its Sizzle

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    Unemployment is low, and hiring is strong. But there are signs that frenzied turnover and rapid wage growth are abating.Last year, Klaussner Home Furnishings was so desperate for workers that it began renting billboards near its headquarters in Asheboro, N.C., to advertise job openings. The steep competition for labor drove wages for employees on the furniture maker’s production floor up 12 to 20 percent. The company began offering $1,000 signing bonuses to sweeten the deal.“Consumer demand was through the roof,” said David Cybulski, Klaussner’s president and chief executive. “We just couldn’t get enough labor fast enough.”But in recent months, Mr. Cybulski has noticed that frenzy die down.Hiring for open positions has gotten easier, he said, and fewer Klaussner workers are leaving for other jobs. The company, which has about 1,100 employees, is testing performance rewards to keep workers happy rather than racing to increase wages. The $1,000 signing bonus ended in the spring.“No one is really chasing employees to the dollar anymore,” he said.By many measures, the labor market is still extraordinarily strong even as fears of a recession loom. The unemployment rate, which stood at 3.7 percent in August, remains near a five-decade low. There are twice as many job openings as unemployed workers available to fill them. Layoffs, despite some high-profile announcements in recent weeks, are close to a record low.But there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.Major employers such as Walmart and Amazon have announced slowdowns in hiring; others, such as FedEx, have frozen hiring altogether.Americans in July quit their jobs at the lowest rate in more than a year, a sign that the period of rapid job switching, sometimes called the Great Resignation, may be nearing its end. Wage growth, which soared as companies competed for workers, has also slowed, particularly in industries like dining and travel where the job market was particularly hot last year.More broadly, many companies around the country say they are finding it less arduous to attract and retain employees — partly because many are paring their hiring plans, and partly because the pool of available workers has grown as more people come off the economy’s sidelines.The labor force grew by more than three-quarters of a million people in August, the biggest gain since the early months of the pandemic. Some executives expect hiring to keep getting easier as the economy slows and layoffs pick up.“Not that I wish ill on any people out there from a layoff perspective or whatever else, but I think there could be an opportunity for us to ramp some of that hiring over the coming months,” Eric Hart, then the chief financial officer at Expedia, told investors on the company’s earnings call in August.Taken together, those signals point to an economic environment in which employers may be regaining some of the leverage they ceded to workers during the pandemic months.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.August Jobs Report: Job growth slowed in August but stayed solid, suggesting that the labor market recovery remains resilient, even as companies pull back on hiring.Factory Jobs: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed during the pandemic — and then some.Missing Workers: The labor market appears hot, but the supply of labor has fallen short, holding back the economy. Here is why.Black Employment: Black workers saw wages and employment rates go up in the wake of the pandemic. But as the Federal Reserve tries to tame inflation, those gains could be eroded.That is bad news for workers, particularly those at the bottom of the pay ladder who have been able to take advantage of the hot labor market to demand higher pay, more flexible schedules and other benefits. With inflation still high, weaker wage growth will mean that more workers will find their standard of living slipping.But for employers — and for policymakers at the Federal Reserve — the calculation looks different. A modest cooling would be welcome after months in which employers struggled to find enough staff to meet strong demand, and in which rapid wage growth contributed to the fastest inflation in decades.Too pronounced a slowdown, however, could lead to a sharp rise in unemployment, which would almost certainly lead to a drop in consumer demand and create a new set of problems for employers.Leila and David Manshoory have struggled for months to recruit workers for their fast-growing skin care and beauty brand, Alleyoop. In recent weeks, however, that has begun to change. They have begun to get more applications from more qualified candidates, some of whom have been laid off by other e-commerce companies. And notably, applicants aren’t demanding the sky-high salaries they were last spring.“I think the tables are turning a little bit,” Mr. Manshoory said. “There are people who need to pay their bills and are realizing there might not be a million jobs out there.”Alleyoop, too, has pared its hiring plans somewhat in preparation for a possible recession. But not too much — Mr. Manshoory said he saw this as a moment to snap up talent that the three-year-old company might struggle to hire in a different economic environment.“You kind of want to lean in when other people are pulling back,” he said. “You just have more selection. There’s a lot of, unfortunately, talented people getting let go from really large companies.”The resilience of the labor market has surprised many economists, who expected companies to pull back on hiring as growth slowed and interest rates rose. Instead, employers have continued adding jobs at a rapid clip.Klaussner Home Furnishings, which has about 1,100 employees, is testing performance rewards to keep workers happy rather than racing to increase wages.Eamon Queeney for The New York Times“There are some signs in the labor market data that there’s been a bit of cooling since the beginning of the year, or even the spring, but it’s not a lot,” said Nick Bunker, director of North American economic research for the career site Indeed. “Maybe the temperature has ticked down a degree or two, but it’s still pretty high.”But Mr. Bunker said there was evidence that the frenzy that characterized the labor market over the past year and a half had begun to die down. Job openings have fallen steadily in Indeed’s data, which is more up to date than the government’s tally.And Mr. Bunker said the decline in voluntary quits was particularly notable because so much recent wage growth had come from workers moving between jobs in search of better pay.Recent research from economists at the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis found that there had been a huge increase in poaching — companies hiring workers away from other jobs — during the recent hiring boom.If companies become less willing to recruit workers from competitors, and to pay the premium that doing so requires, or if workers become less likely to hop between jobs, that could lead wage growth to ease even if layoffs don’t pick up.There are hints that could be happening. A recent survey from another career site, ZipRecruiter, found that workers had become less confident in their ability to find a job and were putting more emphasis on finding a job they considered secure.“Workers and job seekers are feeling just a little bit less bold, a little bit more concerned about the future availability of jobs, a little bit more concerned about the stability of their own jobs,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.Some businesses, meanwhile, are becoming a bit less frantic to hire. A survey of small businesses from the National Federation of Independent Business found that while many employers still had open positions, fewer of them expected to fill those jobs in the next three months.More clues about the strength of the labor market could come in the upcoming months, the time of year when companies, including retailers, traditionally ramp up hiring for the holiday season. Walmart said in September that this year it would hire a fraction of the workers it did during the last holiday season.The signs of a cool-down extend even to leisure and hospitality, the sector where hiring challenges have been most acute. Openings in the sector have fallen sharply from the record levels of last year, and hourly earnings growth slowed to less than 9 percent in August from a rate of more than 16 percent last year.Until recently, staffing shortages at Biggby Coffee were so severe that many of the chain’s 300-plus stores had to close early some days, or in some cases not open at all. But while hiring remains a challenge, the pressure has begun to ease, said Mike McFall, the company’s co-founder and co-chief executive. One franchisee recently told him that 22 of his 25 locations were fully staffed and that only one was experiencing a severe shortage.A Biggby Coffee store in Sterling Heights, Mich. Until recently, staffing shortages at some locations were so severe that many of the chain’s 300-plus stores had to close early some days.Sarah Rice for The New York Times“We are definitely feeling the burden is lifting in terms of getting people to take the job,” Mr. McFall said. “We’re getting more applications, we’re getting more people through training now.”The shift is a welcome one for business owners like Mr. McFall. Franchisees have had to raise wages 50 percent or more to attract and retain workers, he said — a cost increase they have offset by raising prices.“The expectation by the consumer is that you are raising prices, and so if you don’t take advantage of that moment, you are going to be in a pickle,” he said, referring to the pressure to increase wages. “So you manage it by raising prices.”So far, Mr. McFall said, higher prices haven’t deterred customers. Still, he said, the period of severe staffing shortages is not without its costs. He has seen a loss in sales, as well as a loss of efficiency and experienced workers. That will take time to rebuild, he said.“When we were in crisis, it was all we were focused on,” he said. “So now that it feels like the crisis is mitigating, that it’s getting a little better, we can now begin to focus on the culture in the stores and try to build that up again.” More