DETROIT—Hiring in the Motor City region hasn’t been this hard for 20 years.
Seth Gold is offering $250 sign-on bonuses, something he can’t remember happening before in the roughly 80 years his family has run American Jewelry and Loan, a chain of pawnshops. Even then, he sometimes finds entry-level workers want to negotiate with him for higher pay.
“Hiring? It’s a challenge, to put it lightly,” said Mr. Gold as he walked by employees organizing pawned items in the shop’s warehouse filled with power tools, fur coats and motorcycles.
Employers across the greater Detroit region are feeling the impact of the tight labor market.
The Detroit metropolitan area unemployment rate—which can be seen as a gauge of available workers—has held below the nation’s rate since the start of the year, the first sustained period of below-average joblessness in the metro area in two decades.
