Before COVID, Matt Kliegman, CEO of Black Seed Bagels, said people would walk into businesses every day looking for a job.

“Countless people just bring their resume looking for a job and then it just stopped,” he said. 

When traditional hiring methods were not cutting it, Kliegman said he turned to the city and its job training centers, called Workforce 1. 

“I hadn’t heard about, frankly, before COVID and they helped us interview hundreds and hundreds of candidates to fulfill jobs here at Black Seed,” Kliegman said. 

So Black Seed Bagels was a fitting place for Mayor Eric Adams to announce that the city has more than 4.7 million jobs — an all-time high, beating a previous record number of jobs reached last fall.

“We’re doing an analysis of where high unemployment is, and we’re going there in the gyms, in the churches, in the community centers and we’re holding the hands of people - what is a resume, how do you write it, how do you go in for an interview,” Adams said.

The city has also been offering loans to small businesses — up to $250,000 at a 4% interest rate. “People have been able to hire more people, they’ve been able to expand to a second, third, fourth location they’ve been able to pay down higher interest debt,” city Small Business Services Commissioner Kevin Kim said.

Caleb Silver, editor-in-chief of the finance publication Investopedia, said New York City has seen a rebound in jobs since the pandemic.

“We’re almost back to par in terms of where we were four years ago,” Silver said. “That said, the recovery has been uneven, when you look at different sectors of the labor economy.” 

For example, in December, the private education and health services fields grew by nearly 91,800 jobs over 2023 and the leisure and hospitality sector by 15,500 jobs, according to the state Department of Labor. 

Meanwhile, trade, transportation and utilities industries shrunk by 18,700 jobs. The information sector, by 26,300 jobs. In January, the city’s unemployment rate was 5.2%. 

“New York City’s unemployment rate is one of the highest among major metro areas in the country and it’s usually higher than it is across New York State,” Silver said. “You see that because there’s a lot of people either looking for work or looking for the additional jobs. So, we have a higher unemployment rate, especially in the Bronx and in the outer boroughs.”

Adams said he wants to focus on employment opportunities for Black New Yorkers, whose unemployment rate was 9.3% by the end of last year, according to one estimate.

Adams said he met last week with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who raised this issue and said the city should do more to address the disproportionately high unemployment rate.