7 in 10 say it’s a good time to find a quality job: Gallup

Most Americans feel it is a good time to find a quality job, a new Gallup poll finds, despite high inflation and some fears of a potential recession in the near future.

Seventy-one percent of Americans in a Gallup poll released Wednesday said they believe it is a good time to find a quality job. That’s near the 21-year high of 74 percent that Gallup recorded last October.

The U.S. unemployment rate currently stands at 3.6 percent and has remained below 5 percent since last September.

The percentage of U.S. adults who said it was a good time to find a quality job dropped significantly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 68 percent in January 2020 to 22 percent in April 2020, but it has since recovered and remained above 70 percent since last August. 

A record-high 25 percent of the workforce said at the start of the pandemic they thought it was “very” or “fairly likely” they would lose their job in the next year, but that number is now at 15 percent. The figure is still higher than during the few years before the pandemic began. 

Non-college graduates and those whose annual household incomes are less than $75,000 were more likely to report being concerned they will lose their jobs in the next year than college graduates and those making more than $75,000. 

Still, almost two-thirds of those polled said they believe they are “very” or “somewhat likely” to find a new job just as good as their current one if they are laid off. That’s relatively unchanged from the last time Gallup asked that question in 2016. 

A Gallup analyst concluded that high inflation and gas prices are among the top economic issues on Americans’ minds, but the low unemployment rate is keeping views of the job market largely positive.

The survey of 1,018 U.S. adults was conducted April 1-18 via landlines and cellphones with an overall margin of error of 4 percentage points.