Hey there 👋
Something quietly weird happened in May. While tech companies were busy cutting jobs and AI was supposedly eating everything in sight, the U.S. economy added 172,000 jobs — and almost none of them were in tech. Food service alone added 48,000 positions. Healthcare added 35,000 more. Leisure and hospitality had its best month in years.
It’s a bifurcated market out there, and the sectors nobody’s talking about are doing the actual hiring.
Today: The May jobs report dropped a surprise, Xbox is imploding, and AI skills just got a lot more valuable.
In This Issue:
- 🔥 The Big Story: The May Jobs Report Nobody Expected
- ⚡ Quick Hits: 4 major market movements
- 🏢 Companies Hiring: 5 remote-first companies actively building
- 🎯 Career Signal: AI skills now pay 144% more in job postings
- ✅ Quick Win: One resume update that changes the math
🔥 The Big Story
The Jobs Are There — Just Not in Tech
Food service is outpacing Silicon Valley right now, and the BLS numbers prove it.
The headline. The U.S. economy added 172,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in May 2026 — in line with April’s revised 179,000 and March’s revised 214,000. Unemployment held at 4.3%. On the surface, that sounds like a stable-but-unspectacular jobs market. But the sector breakdown tells a completely different story. Leisure and hospitality added 70,000 jobs — five times its average monthly gain of 14,000 over the prior 12 months. Food services and drinking places alone accounted for 48,000 of those. Healthcare added another 35,000, steady with its 12-month average. Financial activities declined. Tech? Not on the gains list.
The bigger picture. This is what a bifurcated labor market looks like in real time. The news cycle is dominated by layoffs at gaming divisions, AI product teams, and enterprise software companies — and those layoffs are real. But the economy isn’t contracting. It’s shifting. Jobs are being added where companies have direct consumer relationships: restaurants, hospitality, home health care, hospitals. For remote job seekers, this creates a challenge and an opportunity simultaneously. The challenge: many of these roles aren’t remote. The opportunity: the businesses adding workers at scale also need remote support functions — operations, finance, marketing, technology infrastructure. A hospitality group adding 200 servers also needs remote analysts and coordinators running the back office.
Why this matters: If you’ve been waiting for tech to rebound before applying, you’re watching the wrong scoreboard. The market that’s actually hiring right now is in sectors you may have ruled out. The job seekers landing offers aren’t necessarily changing careers — they’re finding the remote functions inside growing non-tech companies.
Source: BLS Employment Situation Summary — May 2026
Stat of the Week
70,000 → Leisure and hospitality jobs added in May 2026 — five times the sector’s 12-month monthly average of 14,000. Food services and drinking places accounted for 48,000 of those gains. Meanwhile, financial activities declined.
Source: BLS Employment Situation, May 2026
⚡ Quick Hits
Xbox CEO Calls for Full Business “Reset” — Layoffs Coming After June 30
It’s not good when your CEO describes your business with the phrase “this cannot continue.” Xbox CEO Asha Sharma sent an internal memo to Team Xbox on June 10 laying out the financials for the first time publicly: over the past five years, Xbox spent more than $20 billion on content, platform, and hardware subsidies — and annual revenue declined by nearly $500 million in that time. The company ends fiscal year 2026 at roughly a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year. Sharma confirmed the business needs a “reset” and significant restructuring, with layoffs expected shortly after Microsoft’s fiscal year closes June 30. Marketing budgets and studio support structures are among the areas flagged for cuts.
The layoffs being announced now are for a business that already struggled for five years without course correction. Read the full Xbox Wire statement →
Salesforce Lays Off AI Teams While Agentforce Hits $1.2B in Revenue
The timing is brutal. On June 10, Salesforce filed a California WARN notice covering 86 roles in sales, general administration, and technology — with affected teams including those working on Agentforce (its flagship autonomous AI agent platform), MuleSoft, and Marketing Cloud. The cuts come weeks after Salesforce announced $1.2 billion in Agentforce ARR. The company is restructuring toward a usage-based AI model, which means the teams that built the product are being realigned — or eliminated — as the revenue model underneath them changes.
Cutting the team that built your $1.2B product while that product is still growing is the 2026 playbook. See the breakdown →
AI-Driven Hiring Demand Is Up 40% — Even as Tech Layoffs Dominate Headlines
iCIMS released its June Workforce Report on June 11 (via PRNewswire), and the headline data flips the narrative: while tech layoff headlines dominate, demand for AI-adjacent roles has surged 40% year-over-year across the iCIMS platform. Healthcare, business services, and operations sectors are leading the rebound in hiring activity. The report finds that companies are aggressively posting for roles requiring AI fluency — not just AI engineers, but analysts, coordinators, and managers who can work alongside AI systems. The demand isn’t concentrated in tech; it’s spreading into every sector adding headcount.
The layoff headlines and the hiring data are both true. They’re just describing different companies. Get the details →
DOL: Weekly Jobless Claims Rise as Remote Job Competition Tightens
The Department of Labor reported that seasonally adjusted initial unemployment claims for the week ending June 6 came in at 229,000 — up 4,000 from the prior week’s 225,000. The four-week moving average also ticked up. The claims data lands in a market where workers laid off from hybrid-friendly tech companies are now applying to employers enforcing three-to-five-day in-office mandates — a policy mismatch extending job searches. The pool of genuinely remote openings has rarely been more competitive than it is right now. Companies that have committed to remote as a permanent model (not a benefit they can roll back) are drawing the most serious candidates.
More people filing for unemployment plus fewer remote openings equals a real urgency to find the companies still hiring remotely. Dive deeper →
🏢 Companies Hiring Remotely This Week
The sectors adding the most jobs right now aren’t all remote — but these five companies are building distributed teams across functions. Each has a genuine, verified remote track record.
HubSpot — Remote-first marketing and sales tech company → More than 70% of HubSpot employees work fully remote (“@home”), with open roles across sales, engineering, customer success, product, and marketing. The company ships hardware and monthly stipends to home-office employees. Mix of sizes and functions, with global flexibility built into most roles.
View open remote roles →
GitLab — 100% all-remote since day one → GitLab has operated as a fully distributed company since its founding with more than 2,500+ team members across 65+ countries. No offices, no mandatory in-person days — ever. Open roles span backend engineering, frontend, support, product, and marketing.
View open roles →
Zapier — 100% remote since 2011 → Zapier has never had a physical office and doesn’t plan to. The automation platform company offers every employee a Live Well Budget and Work Well Budget alongside learning stipends. Open roles updated regularly across engineering, operations, and support.
View open roles →
Ascension Health — Remote healthcare roles across clinical and non-clinical functions → Ascension, one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the U.S., has a dedicated remote careers portal with roles in medical billing, coding, health informatics, care coordination, and organizational support. Non-clinical remote roles available without proximity requirements.
View remote roles →
Twilio — Remote-first communications platform → Twilio transitioned to a remote-first model and continues to hire globally across engineering, sales, product management, and customer-facing roles. Positions span from individual contributor to senior leadership with remote availability built into most job descriptions.
View open roles →
Know someone between jobs? Forward this section — it might be exactly what they need.
🎯 Career Signal: AI Skills in Job Postings Have More Than Doubled
Here’s a number worth pausing on: as of May 2026, job postings requiring AI skills have increased +144% year over year — while overall job postings are up just 7% over the same period. That’s from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s AI and Workforce Navigator, which tracks daily data from employment analytics firm Lightcast across thousands of U.S. job postings.
The shift isn’t limited to tech roles. Finance, accounting, higher education, engineering, and operations are all showing rapid growth in AI skill requirements. Employers are increasingly looking for workers who can apply AI tools strategically — not just build them. Lightcast data consistently finds that more than half of AI-skill job postings are outside traditional tech sectors.
The practical implication: AI fluency is no longer a “nice to have” for software engineers. It’s becoming the baseline differentiator across functions, sectors, and experience levels. Candidates who can demonstrate it — even at a basic level — are in a fundamentally different applicant pool than those who can’t.
🧠 Skill-Building Reads
This week’s reads cut straight to the data on where jobs are growing, which skills are paying more, and what the labor market actually looks like underneath the headlines.
1. IMF Staff Discussion Note 2026/001: Bridging Skill Gaps — New Jobs Creation in the AI Age
The International Monetary Fund’s primary research paper on AI and workforce transformation, released in early 2026. Key data points: job postings requiring new skills pay up to 15% more in the UK and 8.5% more in the U.S.; regions with high new-skill adoption see 1.3% higher employment growth per percentage point increase in skill demand. Free PDF, direct from the IMF.
Read it →
2. Bipartisan Policy Center — AI and Workforce Skills Data Dashboard
An interactive, daily-updating dashboard tracking AI skill demand in job postings across every U.S. state and metro area, built from Lightcast data. See which sectors are growing fastest, which regions are lagging, and which AI skill clusters employers are actively requesting. Free, no paywall, updated every day.
Read it →
3. BLS Employment Situation — May 2026 Sector Breakdown
The official Bureau of Labor Statistics data underlying this week’s Big Story. Table A-14 shows the sector-by-sector employment change for May. If you want to know exactly where U.S. jobs are being added and cut — not what pundits say about it, but the actual government numbers — this is it. Free, no login required.
Read it →
✅ Quick Win This Week
Add one AI tool to your resume’s Skills section this week — and describe what you used it for.
Don’t just list “ChatGPT” or “Copilot” — go one level deeper. Write a single sentence in your summary or a bullet in your experience section describing a process you improved using an AI tool. Something like: “Used AI-assisted analysis to reduce weekly reporting time by 40%.” Or: “Integrated Copilot into drafting workflows, cutting content production cycles from 3 days to same-day.” Employers aren’t just looking for familiarity with AI tools — they’re looking for proof you’ve thought about how to use them. The AI skills data shows job postings requiring these skills are growing at 144% year-over-year. The candidates who show application, not just awareness, are getting screened in.
What we’re watching: The post-fiscal-year Xbox layoff count (coming July), whether leisure and hospitality hiring sustains through Q3, and how quickly AI skill requirements spread to mid-market companies outside the enterprise segment.
🎯 Bottom Line
The biggest story this week isn’t another round of tech layoffs — it’s the disconnect between where the layoffs are happening and where the jobs are being added. 172,000 positions were added in May, overwhelmingly in consumer-facing, in-person sectors. That matters for remote job seekers because the support functions behind those businesses — analytics, finance, marketing ops, HR, customer experience — are hiring too, and many of those roles are remote. The job seekers finding the most traction right now are the ones who aren’t waiting for the tech market to normalize. They’re looking at HubSpot, GitLab, and Zapier. They’re qualifying for roles at healthcare systems like Ascension because their skills transfer. And they’re updating their resumes to reflect AI fluency before the competition catches on. Head to RemoteHunter.com for verified remote job listings curated by sector, plus AI tools to sharpen your resume and cover letters before your next application.
Until next week — keep building.
— The RH Team 🤙
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