“Upcoming Hospitality Hires Event Coincides with Strong March 2025 Jobs Report Post Donald Trump Tariffs News”

CHICAGO (WLS) — On April 15, the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership will host its annual Hospitality Hires hiring event.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis reports that over 604,000 individuals in Illinois are currently working in the leisure and hospitality industry, making it a significant sector in the state.

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George Wright serves as the CEO of the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, an organization dedicated to connecting job seekers with employment opportunities. He describes it as the second largest organization of its kind in the nation.

Through collaborations with various community-based organizations, the partnership offers training programs to individuals interested in pursuing careers in different industries. These organizations play a crucial role in delivering the training programs funded by the partnership.

This is the eighth year for Hospitality Hires.

“It was a way for us to think about, how do we get to high sector jobs in a way that was at scale? And so, we started off with this notion of, maybe, we can get a few hundred people to come together. People in the hospitality industry as employers. Inviting people who want to work in the hospitality industry. And last year, we had almost a thousand people register,” Wright said.

Wright says the event has grown every year. As for the jobs that employers will be hiring for, he says, “It’s everything from a person working at a front desk, to a person working in a housekeeping unit. And ironically, or not, a lot of people don’t think about hospitality as IT. But there’s a lot of IT.”

Wright says the event is not a job fair or a career fair. Instead, he says, employers are there to make offers.

And on Friday, the new hiring data in the U.S. beat expectations for the month of March with 228,000. The uptick comes despite deep job cuts within the federal government. But the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%.

This news came just two days after President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on many U.S. trading partners.

Brian Phelan is an associate professor of economics in the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University.

“In the short run, what the tariffs do, is they just introduce a lot of uncertainty: Uncertainty about how the costs of the business are going to increase, uncertainty about whether consumers are going to continue to buy the good, uncertainty about how much they can pass those costs to customers and even uncertainty about whether the tariffs are going to persist or not,” Phelan said.

As for what all this could mean for the jobs outlook, Phelan says, “In the short run, as I was saying, it’s certainly that businesses are likely to sort of not want to invest any new money or expand employment. Over a longer period of time, if they start to believe that these tariffs are going to remain in place, you might start to see some expanded productive capacity in the U.S., but all of that does take a lot of time. It’s a huge investment to build a new plant. It takes a lot time, and so, to the extent that were to occur, it’s unlikely in the short run.”

So, how do experts reconcile this news with the March jobs report?

“When you think about the job report, it was done three weeks ago, and you know, I think that there still is some element of trying to understand whether tariffs are going to be actually implemented,” Phelan said. “And then, in terms of the government jobs sector, you’re not really seeing any of that job loss yet when you look at the jobs report.”

Phelan expects the jobs numbers will decrease in the coming months, “Both because of the tariffs and then because of sort of the rollout of the federal jobs losses.”

For more information on Hospitality Hires, click here.