Job Vacancies Dropped 8% in November; LinkUp Forecasting Anemic Job Gains in November and Job Losses in December
The job market is in far worse shape than people realize with new job openings falling 20% in November, holiday hiring barely registering, and November data pointing to job losses in December.
Because our monthly job vacancy data for November came out this morning, we’ll publish just a single chart from our weekly data along with the usual monthly data and our Non-Farm Payroll (NFP) forecast for November.
Not surprisingly given that Thanksgiving was last week, U.S. job openings posted globally by companies and employers on their websites around the world dropped last week by 145,877 or 5.0% from the week before last. Over the past 3 previous Thanksgiving weeks since 2022, the average decline was 3.7%, so this year’s drop, while expected, is nonetheless quite a bit larger than history would suggest.
Over those same previous 3 years, vacancies rose by an average of 2% the week following Thanksgiving but then dropped steadily thereafter through the end of the year, with an average decline of 4.8% between Thanksgiving and New Years.
Based on where the job market and the economy sit at the moment, what we’ve seen so far this year to get us to this point, and the accelerating rate of destruction going on, we’ll take the over on that average decline all day long - especially given how seriously labor demand is plummeting across the country.
In November, U.S. job openings indexed daily directly from company and employer websites globally declined by 8%, while new job openings plummeted 20% and removed job openings fell 9%.
Job vacancies declined in every single state….
…in both manufacturing and services…
…and in every single industry except Retail-General Merchandise which rose a paltry 1% (so much for holiday hiring).
Job openings fell sharply in both blue and white collar jobs…
…and in every single occupation category.
We’ll provide more extensive commentary in our next post (hopefully in the next day or two) but the short version, not surprisingly, is that the deterioration we’ve highlighted for the past few months is accelerating rapidly. As we noted on Halloween, the job market has moved well beyond ‘softening’ or ‘cooling’ and is now crumbling quite rapidly.
Based on the slightest of upticks in October openings data, we’re forecasting anemic job growth of just 45,000 jobs in November.
But based on the huge drop in job vacancies in November, December job gains will certainly be negative, perhaps materially so.
The bottom line is that labor market is in far worse shape than people realize and when the lights come back on in this horror show, the carnage is going to be quite grim.