Do you remember December 1969? Probably not. Almost two thirds of the US population was not yet born in December 1969. But that’s how far back you need to go to find an unemployment rate lower than the 3.7 percent just released for September 2018.

The US economy is growing rapidly now, and we expect this trend to continue in the coming quarters, meaning that the demand for workers should not slow down. In the past 12 months, the US economy added over 2.5 million jobs. Will an economy at a 3.7 unemployment rate be able to add that many jobs in the next 12 months? It will be very difficult. The labor crunch is much more visible in blue-collar occupations than in white-collar ones, the exact opposite of the trend in recent decades. So 2019 will be a challenging year for recruiters.