There is never just one number that gives you the whole economic picture. In some cases the number itself is bogus (CPI) and what we really care about is the change in the number over multiple periods. That’s why policy is rarely made on just one reading. As much as people are complaining about the job market, maybe the actual job market is still in good shape? Today we got the JOLTS (job openings and labor turnover survey) numbers for the last month.

The chart from the BLS looks like it has a lot of openings, with the separations (layoffs and quits) slightly below hires. There is a giant grain of salt on the openings, in my humble opinion. There are a variety of reasons, but what I’ve seen personally are: 1) openings that are just trolling for resumes; 2) openings to justify H1-B visas; 3) ghost jobs; and 4) fishing.

The first are job openings that aren’t for ‘real’ jobs, they’re just to gather resumes from applicants. Who’s out there? What skills do they have? What are their compensation demands? Second are openings to justify H1-B visa requirements by demonstrating it can’t be filled by a current US worker. Third are the jobs posted to show a company is growing and exciting. And finally, they might get lucky and land a person that is way more qualified than they would normally be able to nab. I don’t trust the openings data to reveal important information, and instead I’m just going to focus on separations and hires over the last few months. The pandemic distorts the data.

Here we see that both hires and separations are trending down. This would be consistent with the anecdotal stories of job hugging. Note that separations include both quits (which may often translate to an offsetting hire), and layoffs (which do not necessarily result in a hire). Looking at data from FRED, I suspect that quits have fallen off while layoffs are accelerating, but I haven’t done the math to validate that. However, we are pushing back toward more than one unemployed person per opening. And remembering my suspicion that a number of openings aren’t valid job openings, it means we are probably already more than 1 unemployed person per actual, real job openings.

Is the job market in good shape? I’m not sure it is, but I’m far from convinced it’s in bad shape. After all, it still appears we have slightly more hires than separations (which includes quits and layoffs). So if someone (on average) is getting hired when someone quits or is laid off, we are not in a bad state. And if we ignore the pandemic data, we see the number of unemployed people to open positions is much lower than the recovery after the 2008 recession. But we are certainly not in the post-pandemic world where we hit .7 unemployed people per opening. That was nuts. But if that’s all that you remember, and that’s your yardstick for the labor market, this middling to good labor market must seem like hell.