What Is the Hardest Month to Get Hired?

In official data for 2023 to 2025, December is the quietest month: US hires and Canadian job vacancies were lowest in December every year, and US hires were lowest after that in November and February. These series cover all jobs, not executives, and a senior search runs for months, so one slow month does not decide it.

What the official data measures

The main US source is the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), a monthly survey of about 21,000 business establishments run by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It counts hires as all additions to the payroll during the month, and job openings as all positions that are open and unfilled on the last business day of the month.

The Canadian source is the Job Vacancy and Wage Survey, published by Statistics Canada as Table 14-10-0371-01. A job counts as vacant if it is vacant on the first day of the month, or becomes vacant during it, if there is work to be done and the employer is actively seeking a worker outside the organization. Statistics Canada counts vacancies, not hires.

Every figure on this page is not seasonally adjusted. Agencies publish adjusted versions to remove the calendar pattern, which is what you want for tracking the economy and the wrong thing for finding the calendar pattern itself.

What the data does not measure

Both series cover all jobs. Neither separates out executive hiring, and the JOLTS overview describes industry and geographic detail, not seniority. A hire in these figures is as likely to be a warehouse worker as a vice president. Statistics Canada publishes occupation detail for its survey quarterly, but the monthly table used here is not split that way, and no source opened for this page gives a seasonal series for senior roles.

Hires and openings also measure different things. A hire is a start date. An opening is a vacancy that has not been filled yet. A month with few hires can follow a month with many offers accepted.

US figures, 2023 to 2025

All figures are in thousands, from the BLS series for hires and job openings, total nonfarm.

For hires the pattern is consistent. December is the lowest month in all three years. The next lowest in each year are November and February: 4,998 and 5,082 in 2023, 4,668 and 4,779 in 2024, 4,451 and 4,482 in 2025. The highest month falls in May or June. In 2025, December hires of 3,879 were about 36% below June hires of 6,102, a difference worked out from the two figures.

The 2026 figures so far fit the same shape. For January to August 2026, hires were lowest in February (4,104) and highest in June (6,139), with August marked preliminary.

Openings are less clean. December is the lowest month in each of the three years, but the series fell across the whole period, from 10,442 in January 2023 to 6,088 in December 2025. Part of any December drop is that downward drift. The peak month moves between January and April.

Canadian figures, 2023 to 2025

Statistics Canada's monthly job vacancy counts for Canada, from Table 14-10-0371-01:

The job vacancy rate is vacancies as a percentage of all occupied and vacant jobs. December is the lowest month in each year and April the highest. In 2025, December vacancies were about 25% below April vacancies, worked out from the two counts. Vacancies recovered in January 2026 (452,160) and reached 554,985 in May 2026.

Does the data support a single "hardest month"?

For fewest hires and fewest vacancies, yes: December, in both countries, in each year checked. For openings the answer is December again, with the caveat about the downward trend. Three years is a short run, and the data cannot say whether the pattern holds in other years.

"Hardest" can also mean the most competition, and that points elsewhere. Indeed's Hiring Lab reported in February 2026 that job searches on Indeed were up to 31% higher in January 2026 than in the early-December 2025 average, while postings in January stayed roughly the same as in late 2025. It describes the pattern, workers pausing their searches over the holidays and returning at the start of the year, as present across six seasons, with January 2021 the exception. Indeed Hiring Lab, 2026 measures searches and postings on its own platform, which is a proxy for how many people are looking, not a count of rivals for any one role.

So the two readings differ. Fewest hires: December. Most people looking at once: January. Neither is a month in which a search cannot succeed.

What this means for a senior search

None of the sources opened for this page isolates executive hiring, so what follows is reasoning, not data.

A hire in any month is the end of a process that began earlier. A low count of December start dates says little about whether conversations were happening in November, and a senior search is built from conversations. Hiring managers, board members and search consultants hold them across the year, and a role can be agreed in one month and start in another. How long Reverse Recruiting takes sets out the usual shape of a search from first outreach to accepted offer.

Quiet weeks suit the work that comes before the offer. Targeting, company research, positioning and the first approaches to named people can all be done when fewer people are competing for the same attention. That is the sequence in how Reverse Recruiting works. Senior roles are sometimes filled without a public posting, and nobody has measured how often (see the handbook definition), so a posting count is a weak guide to when those conversations are possible.

Two cautions follow from the same data. The January rise in search activity suggests more people write to the same decision-makers at the same time, so approaches that are specific and researched matter more then, whatever the month. And the data gives no basis for pausing a search for December. If you are employed, confidentiality is a more reliable constraint on timing than the calendar.

If you are paying a provider by the month, the calendar still matters to you as a cost. The break-even calculator shows how a slower month changes whether a fee pays for itself, and what a search costs sets out the fee models.

Seasonal timing can also arrive without warning: a layoff or restructuring does not wait for a good month. If severance is on the table, see what outplacement is. If volume applications are tempting in a slow month, a job search virtual assistant versus a reverse recruiter explains why that rarely suits a senior search.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the hardest month to get hired?

In the BLS data for 2023, 2024 and 2025, December has the fewest hires in every year: 4,072 thousand, 3,873 thousand and 3,879 thousand. November and February are the next lowest. These figures cover all jobs in the US, so they describe the whole labour market and not senior hiring.

What is the hardest month to find a job?

It depends on what hard means. December has the fewest hires and, in Canada, the fewest job vacancies. January has the most job-search activity on Indeed relative to early December, so competition for each opening is likely to be higher then. The official series do not measure competition for a particular role.

Is December a bad time to job hunt?

December has the lowest hiring and vacancy counts of the year in the 2023 to 2025 data, so fewer roles are being started or advertised. Fewer people are searching too, in Indeed Hiring Lab's reading of six seasons. For a senior search, December suits research, targeting and early conversations, and offers can still arrive.

Which month has the most hires?

In the US data for 2023 to 2025, the peak hires month was June in 2023 and 2025 and May in 2024. In Canada, job vacancies peaked in April in each of the three years. Hires and vacancies are different measures, so the peaks do not have to coincide.

Does the same pattern apply to executive roles?

The official series cannot say. They cover all jobs and do not separate out executive hiring, and none of the sources opened for this page gives a seasonal series for senior roles. Senior searches also run for months, so the timing of a single month matters less than the steadiness of the approach.

Related: Outplacement Services: What They Are and When to Buy Your Own · Job Search Virtual Assistant vs Reverse Recruiter · What Not to Tell a Recruiter or Headhunter · The 70/30 and 80/20 Rules in Hiring, Explained · How Much Does Reverse Recruiting Cost? · Glossary