Data and Insights from Jobcase

Jobcase Market and Industry Insights: Spotlight on Food Service/Restaurant and Call Center/Customer Service

July 31, 2020

Food Service/Restaurant Industry

The Food Service/Restaurant (FSR) industry in the US has been hard hit during the Covid-19 pandemic. From March to April 2020, Jobcase noticed a dramatic 40% drop in FSR job listings, and the industry still maintains a 30% decrease in listings from pre-Covid levels. Early-to-mid June did see a small increase in FSR jobs as many cities across the country continued re-opening plans that included restaurants and bars. While government agencies like the CDC and FDA have provided guidelines for restaurants during the re-opening, Covid-19 cases continue to increase in many parts of the country, and some re-opening plans have been halted and even reversed (e.g. TX & FL).

The volatility of the changes in the Food Service/Restaurant industry can be seen when we look at week-over-week trends. The end of May and early June increases in engagement with FSR jobs on Jobcase were followed by a few weeks of decreases as closures happened again due to spikes of Covid-19 cases. Early July saw another big increase, but that has not sustained further into the month.

However, it is clear that re-opening has had a positive impact on job listings and engagement of those listings by job seekers. When we compiled data on the Food Service/Restaurant industry re-opening dates and then aligned the job listing data on the re-opening dates by state, we do see that there were slight increases in posted jobs a few days prior to re-opening and then a slow increase that followed in the 30 days after re-opening.

-60, 30 for control parameters, just food service – % change in listings from x-axis min

Call Center/Customer Service Industry

Unlike Food Service and Restaurants, the Call Center and Customer Service (CC-CS) industry has recovered to pre-Covid job listing volume. Like most areas of the labor force, CC-CS took a big hit in March and April, dropping to roughly 60% of the available openings before the pandemic. But drastic differences can be seen in the recovery, where both May and June saw over 40% increases in job volume. This has remained consistent throughout the month of July thus far, and is on par with July of 2019.

In large part, this industry rebound is undoubtedly due to the fact that this kind of work can be done from home. Many companies in the Call Center/Customer Service industry have made the transition to remote work, and others that had a work-from-home model already are growing quickly. These remote work options could be a big leap forward for the workforce, enabling key industries like Call Center/Customer Service to provide access to opportunity for large populations of underserved workers.

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