In this week’s macro preview, I described Thursday’s Challenger report as a “now or never” moment for the seasonal hiring push in America.

Recall that last month’s hiring plans as tallied by Challenger, Gray & Christmas were the lowest for any September since 2011, a potentially bad omen for holiday hiring.

Thursday’s update suggests employers made up for it in October — and then some.

There’s the chart. Hiring plans as tallied by Challenger were a staggering 444,692 last month, the most for any October since the financial crisis.

Andy Challenger offered some useful color on how employers’ seasonal hiring strategy has shifted. In the dozen years to 2024, about two thirds of holiday hiring plans occurred in September. That share was just a third last year and fell further to 17% this year.

Most of the October jump was of course attributable to Amazon. Andy Jassy’s hiring 300,000 people for warehousing and e-commerce fulfillment. Technically, those are “tech” hires, and they accounted for 99.92% (and yes, that’s a real number) of total announced “tech” hiring plans for last month.

The figure above shows you the breakdown by company. Amazon and UPS obviously dominate.

You shouldn’t read too much into these hires beyond what they may portend for a decent holiday shopping season. The shift discussed briefly above suggests, as Challenger put it, employers are “waiting longer to see how the season shakes out before they commit to numbers.”

In the same editorial, Challenger offered a somewhat depressing reminder. These aren’t permanent hires. Rather, they’re roles which “give companies the capacity they need for the holidays with an end date built in.”

The rest of the release was generally bullish for the labor market. Layoff announcements in October plunged by almost three quarters versus the same month last year, when deferred resignations from the DOGE debacle bedeviled efforts to get a clean read on the jobs landscape. Announced job cuts have been lower in eight of 10 months this year versus 2025.

As for layoff reasons, AI was blamed for just 1,265 job cuts last month, compared to 16,407 blamed on macroeconomic conditions.

As the updated figure above shows, macro has leapfrogged AI to reclaim the top spot on the scapegoat leaderboard.

That says a lot, none of it good, about the impact of the tariffs and particularly the war.

October’s 43,994 announced layoffs were the lowest for the month since 2023 and, as the report was keen to note, more than 20,000 below the decade average for October.

Just imagine how well things might be going were it not for another Mideast military misadventure.