"Hell of Blunders, Madness, and Deception."
Despite a weak jobs report Friday, LinkUp's labor demand data for March indicates that the U.S. job market is holding up, for the time being, against the brewing storm
It couldn’t be more fitting to be writing this post on Liberation Day as the President outlines the slew of tariffs in a ceremony that perfectly encapsulate his first few months in office. Only 10 weeks in, it’s breathtaking to behold the extent to which the nation, having been rocked off its mooring in November, is now being buffeted by a ‘hell of blunders, madness, and deception’ as Lafayette described the expedition to annex Canada in 1778, a plan as mad today as it was then.
Visibility into the duration and ultimate destruction of the present storm couldn’t be lower, but it’s only a matter of time before it begins taking its toll on the economy generally and the job market specifically. And while we’re forecasting a weaker than expected jobs report for March on Friday based on our data from February, LinkUp’s labor demand data for March indicates that the job market is holding up surprisingly well amid the brewing tempest.
In March, LinkUp’s U.S. job openings, sourced daily entirely from company and employer websites around the world, rose 4% while new jobs rose 10%.
Job openings rose in every state.
For the month, labor demand rose in both manufacturing and services.
Openings rose in every single industry…
…with the largest gains in Management of Companies, Information, and Agriculture.
Labor demand rose for both white and blue collar jobs...
…with gains in all but 2 occupations (Life/Physical/Social Sciences and Arts/Design/Media/Entertainment)…
…and, in a sign that deportations might be starting to hit employers, the largest increases in job openings were seen in Agriculture and Personal Care & Service.
In March, Closed Duration, which essentially measures Time-to-Fill or Hiring Velocity across the entire economy, rose to 47 days.
Closed Duration is a highly useful metric that measures Time-to-Fill based on the number of days an opening, on average, is open on a company’s corporate career portal before it is closed and removed.
The number of part-time jobs as a percent of all U.S. job openings fell 7 bps in March, dropping from 14.70% to 14.63%.
The number of remote jobs as a percent of all U.S. job openings fell 2 bps in March, dropping from 4.65% to 4.63%.
As noted in January, we’ve made a slight tweak to our NFP model by using a time series that runs from the 20th of the prior month to the 19th of the month being reported so that the time series coincides more directly with the BLS survey week which is always the week that includes the 12th of every month. So for March’s data for our model, the data we used includes new and total unique U.S. job openings in our data from the 20th of February through March 19th.
Based on our Mid-Month data and the drop in the blended average of the change in new and total jobs we saw in last month, we are forecasting a net gain of just 75,000 jobs in March, quite a bit below consensus estimates.
