Similar to the brutal and seemingly endless drought ravaging most of the country this Summer, particularly the central U.S., the bad news around the nation’s ability to generate any meaningful job growth will simply not let up. In Q1, the U.S. averaged monthly job gains of 225,000. In Q2, the average monthly job gain dropped to 75,000 jobs per month. While still positive, the monthly net job gain has, of late, not even been sufficient to keep up with population growth and remains well below the number needed to start moving the nation’s unemployment rate down. And like a weatherman in Topeka, we see little on the horizon that gives us any hope that the situation is going to change anytime soon.
In July, new job openings on corporate websites throughout the U.S. fell 2% from June, and total job job openings on corporate websites rose by a scant 1% from the prior month. The job listings data is generated from LinkUp, the nation’s largest and fastest growing job search engine that exclusively indexes only jobs from company websites. As of the end of July, LinkUp’s job search engine included over 1 million jobs openings from approximately 25,000 company websites throughout the U.S. Because LinkUp does not include any jobs sourced from job boards and does not allow anyone to post jobs directly to the site, the search engine does not include any garbage listings such as job scams, phishing posts, work-at-home-scams, lead-gen bait, or old listings. And because LinkUp only indexes jobs from a single source (the employer’s corporate website itself), there are no duplicate listings that pollute aggregator sites such as Indeed and Simplyhired. As a result of these entirely unique attributes, combined with the fact that our index is updated daily, LinkUp stands as the highest quality job site for job seekers and our jobs data is the ‘cleanest’ in the industry, entirely unencumbered by the noise that afflicts other jobs data sets.
In terms of jobs by category, the LinkUp data is exactly the same as jobs by state, with new job listings by job category falling 2% and total jobs by category rising 1%.
Because there is typically a 30-day lag between the time a company posts a job opening and when that job is filled with a new hire, we are basing our July jobs report on LinkUp’s June job openings data. In June, new job openings on LinkUp declined 4.3% and total job openings on company websites rose by a miniscule .5%. Using a blended 50/50 ratio of those two inputs (which equates to -1.9%), we expect that job growth will decline by 20,000 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) nonfarm payroll number for June, which was 80,000. So despite the consensus economic forecast of net job growth of 100,000 tomorrow, we believe that the number will be slightly worse, with only 60,000 jobs gained in July. And with the lackluster numbers from LinkUp’s job search engine in the past 30 days, we expect that the BLS numbers will decline again in August, with only 50,000 jobs gained in the U.S. economy next month.
Maybe if we all start listening to the Rain Song, we can turn this thing around.
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