Job Vacancies in the U.S. Posted by Employers Globally Dropped 1.3% Last Week

Labor demand in the U.S. continues to drop as the job market has moved well beyond softening or cooling to something more like crumbling.

As likely as it looks that the shutdown will end before the end of the week, it will still be some time before the BLS resumes its scheduled data release dates. And even then, it remains an open question as to what the reports will look like given the interruption in data collection, continued declines in survey response rates, potential staff losses during the shutdown, and rising politicization across all Federal agencies, especially those publishing data and information.

With that in mind, we are going to start regularly publishing our weekly job market data for the U.S. here. As background for those that might be new to LinkUp and our data, we index millions of job openings around the world every single day, all of them sourced directly from the corporate career portals on company and employer websites themselves.

We do NOT source any of our data from job boards or LinkedIn or other 3rd party aggregators as those sources of openings are plagued by expired listings, insane levels of duplication (roughly about 80% - and de-duping, by the way, is not a real thing), and job board pollution (fraud, scams, sponsored/paid job ads, phishing, etc.).

Because we go directly to an employer’s or company’s corporate career portal, our data is always accurate, complete, and current. It’s a daily dataset that goes back to 2007 but for our Macro Compass SaaS applications for the US, UK, EU and Canada (which is where we pulled all the U.S. charts below), we use weekly and monthly aggregates (except for the last chart which includes total daily active job openings and a rolling 7-day average for new and removed jobs). The weekly data below runs from Sunday to Saturday and is available to clients on Sunday mornings, 24 hours before U.S. markets open Monday morning.

So to start, even though it’s nearly identical to the monthly data, it’s useful to look at weekly job openings in the U.S. since January 2019.

To drill into the detail a bit more closely, below is weekly total, new and removed jobs since March 2022 when the Fed began hiking interest rates.

Since the election, labor demand has dropped 15% and since April 1st, it’s dropped 12%. Last week, labor demand dropped 1.3%, the 4th consecutive weekly decline.

Since mid-September, labor demand has dropped significantly in both manufacturing and services.

And last week, labor demand fell in most sectors.

Over the past month or so, labor demand has also dropped significantly in both blue and white collar jobs.

And last week, every single occupation group showed a decline in labor demand.

Since October 1st, daily job vacancies in the U.S. posted by employers worldwide has dropped from 2.71M to 2.55M yesterday, a decline of 5.9%

As we wrote on Halloween in our post forecasting a decline of 5,000 jobs for the October NFP report, the labor market has moved well beyond softening or cooling to something more like crumbling. And given October’s data, we expect more of the same for at least the remainder of the year.

Lastly, as we mentioned at the outset, we’ll be publishing our weekly job vacancy data here on Mondays going forward, and if anyone is interested in our raw data or our web-based Macro Compass applications, contact me at toby.dayton@linkup.com.