With the new year may come a career change for some. In this week's Deep Dive, News 12's Kristie Reeter is taking a deep dive into the job market to see where hiring has been, where it has slowed and how inflation is having an impact.

In a News 12 poll, New Jersey residents were asked: When looking for a job, what extras are important to you? A majority said they are looking for flexible hours -- 57%.

When looking at the job market, experts are always tracking the unemployment numbers, and so is Caleb Silver from Investopedia.

We heard this week a warning from the Federal Reserve Chair that high inflation could actually make it harder to restore the job market, so we asked Silver: what does that mean and what are we seeing in New Jersey?

“What the Fed is saying is that the way we battle inflation is raising interest rates, that raises borrowing costs for companies which could depress hiring if it gets more expensive to expand and hire more workers, plus wages have been rising too, you get wage inflation as well,” says Silver. “In New Jersey, you got the unemployment rate down now at 6.6%, that is still the 4th highest in the country. The country is 3.9%. The major [of the] counties that we track though across New Jersey, [are] doing slightly better than the state average. Hudson at 5.7%, Bergen 5.1%, Monmouth at 4.6% and Morris County down at 4.2% close to the national average."

If the unemployment rate is going down, well why has hiring slowed?

“They are based on two different surveys,” says Silver. “So, the unemployment rate, the Labor Department [is] calling households and seeing who is filing for unemployment, less people filing for unemployment claims, but not that many people being hired except in the restaurant industry which lost the most jobs, so you are not seeing a ton of hiring, but you are seeing less people filing for unemployment."