24/7 Wall St.

The month of May was the strongest single month for hiring new employees since June of 2015, according to a report released Monday morning by professional social media site LinkedIn. Across the country, the rate of new hiring was up 2.4% compared with May 2016.

The industries that experienced the biggest increase in LinkedIn’s hiring rate in May are architecture and engineering (up 21% month over month); aerospace, automotive and transportation (up 19%); manufacturing and industrial (up 19%); and financial services and insurance (up 16%).

LinkedIn defines hiring rate as “the percentage of LinkedIn members who changed the name of their new employer on their profile the same month they began their new job, divided by the total number of LinkedIn members in the U.S.” LinkedIn reports that more than 138 million U.S. workers have LinkedIn Profiles and that more than 20,000 companies use the service to recruit new employees.

In the manufacturing/industrial sector, the hiring rate rose 12.4% year over year (unadjusted) and 19.1% month over month (seasonally adjusted). According to the nonfarm payroll report released last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unadjusted year-over-year manufacturing employment rose by about 5.2% and seasonally adjusted employment in manufacturing rose by 5.1%.

Of the 10 cities losing the most workers, all but one are east of the Mississippi River. The top two cities losing workers were Hartford, Connecticut, (population loss of 55.1 workers per 10,000 LinkedIn members) and Norfolk, Virginia, (51.2 workers lost). The remaining eight cities that lost the most workers include Providence, Rhode Island, (down 51); Pittsburgh (down 44.5); Oklahoma City (down 40.0); Chicago (down 37.8); Baltimore (down 32.0), St. Louis (down 30.5); Cincinnati (down 29.9) and Memphis (down 28.2).

The 10 cities gaining the most workers per 10,000 LinkedIn members were:

1. Austin, Texas: 569.5 workers gained
2. Orange County, California: 484.5 workers gained
3. San Diego: 463.6 workers gained
4. Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina: 454.2 workers gained
5. West Palm Beach: 446.6 workers gained
6. Washington, D.C.: 414.8 workers gained
7. Charlotte, North Carolina: 391.3 workers gained
8. Providence, Rhode Island: 388.1 workers gained
9. San Francisco Bay Area: 378.7 workers gained
10. Orlando: 366.8 workers gained

The report noted that health care skills are needed in every U.S. city except Philadelphia, Cleveland and St. Louis. Skills like clinical data analysis, pharmaceutics and urgent care are in scarcity in most U.S. cities.

Looking in detail at the report for the San Francisco Bay Area, the skills most in abundance are all technology-related, such as PERL/Python/Ruby programmers, and the skills that are scarcest include health care management, sales and retail store operations.

The full report is available here.