Job openings down but this actually doesn’t look that bad

7 comments

1. It’s hard to read this and know if the trade war is contributing but it looks to me like a normalization after the covid driven rehiring spike.

2. Is this normalized for full-time salaried positions, or does it include hourly part-time and temp openings?

   If the latter, it might not be saying anything good at all. An economy that sheds (making up numbers) 150k software engineering, finance, and law jobs but posts 150k fast food, 7/11, and $14/hr manufacturing “temp” jobs with mo benefits is not a healthy one at all.

3. Job openings is not a trustworthy metric anymore. Way too many postings are not posted in good faith, fall through on funding, are canceled, are replaced by consulting, are filled internally, or are backfills.

4. Can these jobs actually enable people to live well? That’s probably the metric we should be using instead.

5. What about workers taken out of the labor force, who really don’t want to be out of the labor force?

   These metrics haven’t been sound or useful for years now.

6. Good for business bad for labor 

7. Boomers are still retiring in massive numbers, so it’s creating a situation that we really haven’t seen in a job market before. The signs are all there that the country is in a recession, but because boomers keep leaving the workforce, hiring continues to grow.

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