LinkUp Forecasting Below-Consensus Job Gains in June but July Data Points to Stronger Gains in August

New job openings in the U.S. rose 10% in July, giving strong indication that the surprisingly resilient job market will likely be sustained for at least the next month or two

Clearly not for lack of subject matter, it’s been a while since we’ve posted anything here regarding the job market, the U.S. economy, or the general state of affairs these days. In trying to figure out where and how to wade into the accelerating chaos and insanity we’re living in, I am reminded of the response that WorldQuant founder Igor Tulchinsky recently gave to David Ramli when presented with the various solutions that have been proposed to address AI’s decimation of employment and the labor market as we know it:

“I see you’re a glass half full kind of guy.”

Despite the overarching tenor of our outlook over the past 18 months and how we see things playing out, at least in the near-term, I continue to regard myself as an optimist (seriously). The critical factor, as is often the case, is timeline. Eventually, we’re going to get through this and come out the other end in a better place, but things are, most assuredly, going to get worse before they get better. Far worse.

And even as the consensus view continues to escalate toward higher and higher degrees of alarm, we’ll likewise continue to reassert the view we first made well over a year ago that regardless of how horrific anyone’s most dire scenario is about what lies ahead, we’ll take the over. The phoenix will ultimately emerge from the ashes, but the inferno we’re descending into is going to be one nasty hellscape. And not dissimilar to AI, the key thing is to avoid rendering the species extinct before we make it out.

Amid the descent, with the daily tsunami of headlines, the litany of horrors is seemingly infinite. Books on the regime change have already been written, endless others are undoubtedly in process, and countless more will be published for generations to come. It’s too much; and yet I’m still compelled to note the most prominent facets of this infinitely-faceted nightmare, if for no other reason than my own catharsis.

Unending wars in Europe and the Middle East and increasingly unsubtle hints of World War III emerging. Alliances obliterated. Europe and North America burning. AI, already terrifying, going rogue. Immigrant prison camps. ICE killings continuing unabated. Unprecedented D.C. corruption. The constitution in tatters. Free and fair elections in peril. A capitulating, sycophantic, geriatric congress. Epic and still rising income inequality. A totalitarian gong show surpassed in magnitude only by the clown show of incompetence. An epidemic of epidemics. More and more nonsensical tariffs. A crushing affordability crisis. And on and on and on it goes as we barrel down this road to the apocalypse. It’s beyond surreal.

As David French wrote recently in a NYT Op-Ed entitled The War That Could Swallow the World:

“I’ve often wondered what it was like to be alive in the summer of 1914, much less in 1938 and 1939. When did people start to realize that the world was on the brink of catastrophe? Speak up too soon or too frequently, and you look ridiculous — like the Chicken Little of world war. Speak up too late, and you live (if you live) with bitter regret.”

What makes this all even more ridiculously absurd (assuming that’s possible) is the fact that the U.S. economy keeps chugging along, the stock market is setting new records nearly every week, and the job market is holding up shockingly well.

In fact, as the chart below indicates, new job openings in the U.S. indexed by LinkUp daily directly from company and employer websites globally rose 10% in July and YoY, labor demand is up 15% from July of 2025 and nearly 20% since November.

Granted, last year’s job market was abysmal, so year-over-year comparisons should be taken with a large grain of salt, but since January, job openings have risen 14% with only a single monthly decline in May, and only -1% at that.

While we are forecasting a below-consensus gain of just 30,000 jobs in July due to June’s 2% drop in new jobs combine with that month’s small total job openings gain of just 0.2%, that weakness should be more than off-set by what our data portends for job growth for at least the next month or two (WWIII notwithstanding).

The strength of July’s labor demand data was broad and deep across every metric.

Only two states saw a decline in total job openings…

….and newly posted openings rose in every single state.

Labor demand rose in both manufacturing and services….

…and in nearly every industry…

…with small decreases in only 5 sectors.

Similarly, labor demand rose in both blue and white collar jobs…

…and in nearly all occupations…

with declines in just 3 O*Net categories.

Interestingly, remote jobs have picked back up again this year as the labor market has tightened.

And lastly, our data continues to diverge from the Department of Labor’s lagging, deteriorating, and borderline irrelevant JOLTS data.

So as we mentioned above, we are forecasting a net gain of just 30,000 jobs in June, quite a bit below the consensus estimates of 80,000.

But again, based on our July data, we expect that job gains will pick up significantly in August (assuming, of course, that the world hasn’t been obliterated by then).