Labor Market Optimism, Financial Wellness, and a New Perk for Amazon Sellers

Gene Marks (00:00)

Hey everybody, it's Gene Marks. And welcome back to another episode, the weekly episode of the Paychex THRIVE Week in Review. This is where we take news that impacts your business and mine and talk about it just, just a little bit. So, let's get right to it, shall we? 

The first news comes from ZipRecruiter, the very popular platform for searching for employees. This report comes over Business Wire. ZipRecruiter, they are a leading employment marketplace, they released the results from their second annual employee survey, and they found that there is renewed optimism in the labor market. Let me give you some of these numbers. According to the report, employers are optimistic about 2025. 70% of the surveyed employers say they plan to expand headcount in the coming year, with 53% anticipating modest increases and 2% expecting more significant growth. Meanwhile, 21% are expecting hiring to remain steady and fewer than 4%, fewer than 4% expect reductions in their workplace. That's certainly good news. Over 80% of employers across technology, financial services and healthcare plan to expand in 2025, signaling renewed labor market optimism after two years of declines. This is according to ZipRecruiter's chief economist. Easing inflation and stabilizing interest rates are fueling employer confidence. 64% say macroeconomic conditions will support their hiring in 2025. One other little tidbit in this report, it's a great report and worthy of reading the entire thing, but the thing that also caught my eye was about remote working as well. According to the report, companies have solidified hybrid work as the dominant model for remote working. 40% of employers surveyed support a mix of in office and remote work in 2024, whereas fully remote work sharply declined only 7% of the companies surveyed compared to 21% in 2023. So, the takeaways from this report looks like hiring is going to rebound next year. Employers are feeling optimistic about the economy and the labor market, and it seems like a hybrid approach to remote work is what's most popular. Being fully virtual is becoming less and less popular. 

The next bit of news comes from HR Brew. It's hr-brew.com and it has to do with employees' wellness. HR Brew wrote a piece about actually Chipotle, the awesome Mexican taco and fast-food chain. They said that this year they have offered them financial counseling benefits to help employees cope. And this past year they expanded their financial wellness offerings to include student debt repayment, pay on demand, and a special debit card that helps users build a credit profile. According to Chipotle's director of global benefits. They said that more than 73% of their roughly 125,000 global employees are Gen Zers who are racking up credit card debt quickly and aren't confident in their money management skills. Some other bits of information Gen Z single parents, caregivers are in especially financially precarious positions, according to another report by the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. Yet overall, workers are not happy with their financial situation. Only 32% of workers rate their financial wellness as excellent or very good. So, it makes sense for companies to offer financial wellness to their employees. In fact, it is the second most requested benefit among workers as far as resources to help with their finances, with nearly a third of employees, according to this Guardian survey, desiring it. The first request was to have employers have a greater share of benefit costs, with 51% of workers citing that so what's the take takeaway from all of this? It's this. A greater percentage of workers are Gen Zers. A lot of them need help with their own financial wellness. It's not just health wellness, it's also financial wellness. So, a more popular employee benefit, a growing employee benefit, is providing financial wellness help to your employees. That could be in the form of straight out helping them repay things like student loans, but also help with financial consulting as well and advice to help them manage their finances that much better. It is a growing need and a growing benefit. 

Finally, word from Amazon.com and Intuit, the largest maker of accounting software, particularly for small businesses. According to a CNBC report this week, Amazon's millions of third-party sellers will be able to soon bring their sales and inventory data into its QuickBooks through a new integration. The companies are targeting mid-2025 to bring the product to market, starting with sellers in the U.S. Amazon's marketplace accounts for more than half of all the goods of the retail of Amazon's marketplace and the great majority of the Amazon marketplace sellers are small businesses and small merchants. So again, new integration coming between Amazon and QuickBooks. So, if you are selling online and you're an Amazon merchant, that'll make you make it easier to integrate your transactions with your backend accounting system if you're using QuickBooks. I can tell you there are other third-party applications out there that do this. Some come at a cost, some, you know, maybe limited in resources or whatnot. So, this will be an interesting little bit of technology to look at. Again, if you are an Amazon reseller or you're a merchant. 

My name is Gene Marks, and you have been watching or listening to this week's episode of the Paychex Thrive Week in Review. If you have any questions or need advice or tips to help you run your business, to sign up for our Paychex Thrive newsletter, I promise you, you won't regret it. Go to paychex.com/thrive thanks so much for watching and listening. We'll see you again next week with some more news that impacts your business. Take care. 

Announcer (06:15)

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