Survey: The share of Wisconsin businesses struggling to hire hits lowest level in a decade

The share of Wisconsin businesses that report struggling to find workers fell to its lowest level in a decade, according to a new survey.

The improvement comes while unemployment in Wisconsin remains near record lows.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business group, released the results of a survey of more than 150 businesses this week. The survey found that 63 percent were struggling with hiring, down from 72 percent a year ago.

The winter of 2015 was the last time the share of businesses reporting problems finding workers was this low. In that survey, 63.9 percent of respondents had trouble hiring.

Manufacturers in northeast Wisconsin reported a similar trend. The share of businesses that reported having difficulty finding talent fell from 84 percent last year to 58 percent in 2025, according to a survey from the Northeast Wisconsin Manufacturing Alliance.

WMC President Kurt Bauer said he believes hiring struggles have eased because the demand for workers has slowed. He said the manufacturing sector specifically has been “in a bit of a slump for the last nine months.”

“That means that hiring throughout the state has slowed down because, of course, manufacturing has a trickle effect,” he said. “For every one job in a factory, you create four jobs in other sectors of the economy. If manufacturing is a little bit slow, that could reverberate throughout the economy.”

State data shows that the number of job openings in Wisconsin has been steadily declining since November 2022.

But unemployment in Wisconsin continues to hover around record lows, and employment at record highs. Last month, the state reported that the unemployment rate in November was 2.9 percent, more than a percentage point below the national average. And a record high 3.07 million people were employed, the seventh straight month of record employment numbers.

In October, the most recent month with available data, there were 140,000 job openings in Wisconsin and 90,000 residents on unemployment. 

When openings peaked in November 2022, there were 268,000 job openings in Wisconsin and 87,000 people unemployed. That year, WMC’s surveys showed more than 80 percent of businesses had trouble hiring. 

Ann Franz, executive director of the Northeast Wisconsin Manufacturing Alliance, said finding talent was a major challenge for most companies in 2022. She said manufacturers were seeing strong demand for parts and products as they also saw older employees begin to age out of the workforce.

“That time period (employers were) seeing more of that aging workforce starting to leave,” she said. “After COVID, a lot of the people that left the workplace, especially women, didn’t come back as strongly as the way they left.”

In response, Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development Secretary Amy Pechacek said the agency ramped up its efforts to connect workers to careers through the youth and registered apprenticeship programs, both of which had record participation in 2024. 

She said the state also focused on efforts to provide jobs training to veterans and incarcerated individuals, as well as attracting more people to the state. She said she believes those efforts played a role in the decline of employers reporting hiring struggles early this year.

“We know our work isn’t done, and we need to continue to support our workforce and our businesses going forward,” Pechacek said.

That’s because the demographic picture for the state’s employers isn’t expected to get better any time soon. Wisconsin’s population is expected to decline by nearly 200,000 residents by 2050, fueled by declining birth rates and aging baby boomers, according to a state Department of Administration report.

While Franz and Bauer said hiring slowed in 2024, they both said hiring could pick up again in 2025.

The WMC survey showed 56 percent of Wisconsin businesses plan to increase their number of employees in the next six months.

As businesses ramp up hiring, Bauer said it’s “inevitable” that the share of companies that report hiring struggles will tick back up again.

“The bottom line is that, long-term, Wisconsin has a demographic challenge that has an impact on the economy because we just don’t have enough people to replace retiring baby boomers,” he said. “We don’t have enough millennials, we don’t have enough Gen Z, to fill those jobs. If the jobs aren’t filled, they go away.”