The current labor market has been described as a “low hire, low fire” economy. The graph below shows the number of hires per month in Georgia along with the number of separations. Hiring rose after the pandemic, peaking at 325,000 in February 2022.
Separations, including layoffs and voluntary quits, followed a similar upward trend but peaked later in June 2022. Hiring and separations have declined to about half their peak level in the latest data for October 2025. Hires are about 20,000 per month lower than their long-term average, and separations are about 30,000 lower.
Between April and August 2023, hiring exceeded separations by over 40,000 in four out of the five months. In April 2024, hires exceeded separations by over 50,000. By contrast, hiring has exceeded separations by 68,000 in the first ten months of 2025.
There are several suggested reasons for this reduced hiring. First, there are concerns about the state of the economy and associated policy. While Gross Domestic Product increased at a stellar 4.3% in the third quarter of 2025, the national labor market has been weak. Some of this contradiction is explained by firms investing in capital rather than labor. This is augmented by firms experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence to handle more work. Additionally, as shown in the graph above, firms may have overhired post-pandemic when there was a labor shortage that may have led some firms to labor hoarding.
Employees are also less likely to quit their jobs right now. In October 2025, just 83,000 Georgians quit their jobs, on a par with the height of the pandemic. With less quits, there is less need for firms to hire. The outlook for 2026 doesn’t look much different, according to Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed, and reported by The Wall Street Journal.
