In-person jobs are shrinking nationally. The Coast added 1,200 last year.
A now-hiring sign in a storefront window. Photo: Nathan Sack / Unsplash
By late August the restaurants along the beachfront are hiring the way they have always hired, with a sign in the window and a shift starting Friday. A national study published this summer says that kind of work is losing ground across the country. On this stretch of coast it did the opposite.
The study comes from Coresignal, a company that collects and cleans publicly posted job advertisements. It took 2.6 million American ads aimed at people starting out and sorted them by the kind of work they involve. One of its two central findings concerns in-person and manual roles, the food service, retail, warehouse, trades and driving jobs that make up much of the entry-level hiring here. Their share of entry-level ads dropped by six points between the first five months of 2025 and the same months of 2026.
Run across every employer in the data rather than only those advertising in both years, the same decline measures 9.5 points. Coresignal attributes much of that gap not to jobs leaving the market but to employers writing looser titles, and leads with the smaller figure for that reason.
Mississippi Department of Employment Security figures for July put leisure and hospitality employment in the Gulfport-Biloxi metropolitan area, which covers Hancock, Harrison, Jackson and Stone counties, at 35,100. That is 1,200 more than a year earlier, a gain of 3.5 percent. Nonfarm employment across those four counties grew by 1,200 over the year in total. Hotels, restaurants and the businesses attached to them accounted for the whole of it.
Two different things are being counted, and it is worth being exact about which. The state figures count people on payrolls. The study counts advertisements, and reports shares rather than totals, so a category can shrink as a portion of all ads while the number of people doing the work rises. Both can be true in the same year. On the Coast, both were.
Where the study does place Mississippi is near the bottom of its state table. It rates 6.8 percent of entry-level ads here as “AI-exposed,” meaning roles current software can already perform part of, against a national average of 13.3 percent. Only Wyoming ranks lower. Coresignal marks Mississippi as a state rising from a low base rather than one where the pattern has taken hold.
The company is candid about what it cannot see. It has no way to know why an ad was posted, or whether anyone was hired from it.
For anyone reading the national coverage from down here, that is the part to hold onto. A shrinking share of advertisements is a statement about how employers are writing. Payrolls are a statement about who is working. This summer the two pointed in different directions, and only one of them has people in it.
