Small Business Hiring Finally Ticks Up — But Owners Still Can’t Find Enough Good Help

After four straight months of decline, Main Street got a small piece of good news this week: the National Federation of Independent Business reported that its small-business employment index rose in July, snapping the losing streak. For the diner owner in Maple Shade or the plumbing outfit in Washington Township, a number moving in the right direction is worth pausing over.

But before anyone breaks out the champagne, read the fine print — because the same NFIB July jobs report handed us a challenge every small-business owner in South Jersey already feels in their bones. For the first time in a while, labor quality and availability jumped to the top of the list of concerns for small-business owners. Translation: the help-wanted sign is back in the window, and it’s staying there.

The puzzle of late-summer 2026

Owners want to hire. The appetite is there. But finding people who show up, who stick, who can do the work — that’s the wall a lot of Main Street businesses keep running into. It doesn’t help that the broader labor market is cooling around them. The July numbers told a muddy story: ADP counted private-sector gains of 44,000 jobs, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an unexpected drop of 23,000 in total nonfarm payrolls. When the two headline surveys disagree by that much, it usually means the same thing — hiring is slowing, and fewer people are actively looking for work. For a small-business owner, a softer labor force isn’t an abstraction. It means the applicant pool that was thin in the spring got thinner in the summer.

And there’s a hangover from earlier in the year that hasn’t fully cleared. New Jersey’s NFIB state director has been candid that the 2026 outlook for a lot of smaller businesses remains cloudy. Tariff changes earlier in the year drove up the cost of imported materials, and some owners said they were still eating those higher input costs — the kind of squeeze that makes you think twice before adding a payroll line.

Manage what you can control

So what does a South Jersey owner do with a mixed report like this? The honest answer is: keep your head down and manage what you can control. The employment index turning positive is a real signal that the worst of the pullback may be behind us. But the labor-quality problem is not going to fix itself, and the owners who win the back half of this year will be the ones who figure out retention — better schedules, a clearer path to a raise, treating good people like they’re hard to replace, because right now they are.

The story of the South Jersey economy has never really been about the macro numbers. It’s about the woman who opened a bakery in Collingswood and is now trying to hire her third employee.Mason Carter

The index went up in July. That’s a start. Now comes the hard part: filling the jobs the recovery is finally creating.

Based on reporting from ROI-NJ, NFIB, New Jersey Business Magazine, and WHYY.