January hiring slips 2.8%; bright spots in U.S. are legal, software and finance — from linkedin.com by George Anders

Excerpt:

If you’re looking for further evidence that U.S. industry is running on two different tracks these days — in which “laptop economy” professions such as legal and finance are doing fairly well, while face-to-face jobs are facing tough times — that message is starkly clear in the latest edition of LinkedIn’s Hiring Report.

For January, the U.S. Hiring Report showed a 2.8% decline from December’s reading, and an overall 7.6% drop from a year earlier. What looks like relatively mild slippage in aggregate turns out to be two trends pointing in sharply different directions once the focus switches to industry-by-industry outcomes.

Three industries remain ahead of their hiring tempo a full year ago, in spite of the overall decline. They are legal (+3.8%), finance (3.4%) and software and information technology (+3.0%).