Do you understand what job seekers are looking for?

Exploring job seeker behavior helps you customize your outreach, hiring, and communication methods. Analyzing trends in ag job postings also provides an avenue for producers, from small family farms to large corporations, to further understand the job market specific to our industry. AgCareers.com reviews these trends yearly in its U.S. Agriculture & Food Job Report.

Continuing the rebound in hiring after COVID, the 2022 United States unemployment rate dropped again. The 2022 average monthly unemployment rate was 3.6%, compared to 5.4% in 2021 and 8.1% in 2020. While these are nation-wide trends for all industries, the AgCareers.com job report focused on the agricultural industry. The ag industry had strong hiring numbers in 2022 with an increase of 12% in jobs posted on AgCareers.com.

Job trends

There were over 41,000 jobs posted in the United States in 2022. Jobs peaked in the first quarter, followed by another peak in October.

Sales/retail careers continued as the most frequently posted career type, followed by farm & ranch operations/herdsperson/on-farm jobs. Transportation/truck driver was one of the trending career types experiencing increases in hiring.

When we examine all U.S. jobs by industry sector, “Chemical, Pesticide and Fertilizer,” was the leading industry type, followed by “Input Retail, Cooperative and Related Crop Services” then “Plant & Soil Sciences, Seed & Biotechnology” and “Crop Production.”

Focusing on jobs posted by state, eight of the top ten were in the Midwest with Iowa leading the hiring, followed by Nebraska and Illinois.

Candidate trends

If we look at applications by region, the largest segment was from the Midwest. Applicants come from candidates in every state, but there were the most applications from California and Texas.

Over 40% of applicants using AgCareers.com had a bachelor’s degree, while 14% had an associate’s diploma or skilled trade certificate, and 21% had a high school diploma as their highest education level. For those with post-secondary education, the majority had an ag-related degree. Likewise, 54% of applicants were currently or most recently employed in ag occupations.

Search activity and applications processed on AgCareers.com helps track job seeker trends in agriculture. Candidates search for jobs on AgCareers.com by location, industry, career type and more. Searching simply by keyword is the most simple and popular. While we note that oftentimes production ag operations cannot offer a work-from-home scenario, it’s important to acknowledge the popularity of it among candidates.

“Remote” took over the leading spot in candidates’ keyword searches over the past year. Job seekers’ top 2022 job search words were: 1) remote; 2) marketing; 3) sales; 4) intern; and 5) agronomy. The pandemic’s influence fueled this trend in “remote” searches based on job seeker expectations post-COVID and work-from-home availability.

Explore more industry sectors, regional trends and candidate data in the full 2022 U.S. Agriculture & Food Job Report—download a copy at www.AgCareers.com under market research.

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Farm Progress.