- by New Deal democrat
Yesterday’s JOLTS report for November was not stale inasmuch as it was at best delayed by a week or two. But nevertheless, since it was for November it remains somewhat old news that can only help to confirm other data we have already received.
Last month I concluded that the October report “was emphatically not good. In fact, it was red flag recessionary.” But I also noted it was insufficient without confirmation by another month of two’s worth of data.
In a nutshell, November’s report did not confirm October’s. For most of 2025, in contrast to much other data in the jobs sector, the JOLTS reports had been very much consistent with a “soft landing” jobs scenario. It was not so in October, but returned to that configuration in November.
To briefly recap, the survey decomposes the employment market into openings, hires, quits, and layoffs. The first of those, openings, is soft data that can be influenced by stale or false postings, and trolling for new resumes. It has been on a general uptrend ever since the inception of the series 25 years ago. In contrast, the other series are hard data representing actual actions - and all of those were bad.
Let’s begin with job openings (blue), hires (red), and quits (gold) all normed to 100 as of just before the pandemic:
The “soft” data of openings has been rangebound between 7.103 million and 8.031 million for the past 18 months. This month it declined -303,000 to near the lower bound of that range at 7.146 million. Meanwhile actual hires declined -253,000 to 5.115 million, the lowest reading since the pandemic except for June of 2024. On the other hand, quits rose 188,000 to 3.161 million, solidly in their 18 month recent range. In general, what we see is a sideways trend in all of these for the past 18 months, with a slight jag towards the lower range in the past 6 months.
On the same vein, layoffs and discharges, which while noisy lead both continued jobless claims (gold) and the unemployment rate (red) declined -163,000 to 1.687 million, right in the middle of their 18 month range:
This suggests that in particular the unemployment rate is unlikely to rise further in this or next month’s report.
Finally, the quits rate (left scale), which typically leads the YoY% change in average hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers (red, right scale), rose 0.1% back to 2.0%, also in the middle of its range for the past 12+ months:
This suggests that nominal wage growth, which has been trending slightly downward during that period, is likely to stabilize at least this month. The question here is very much whether the inflation rate will continue to rise (complicated by the downward kludging of the huge shelter component of inflation that will remain with us for at least several more months).
I called the last JOLTS report for October “a bad, even recessionary, report consistent with actual job losses in October.” This report was also consistent with the slight positive rebound in the jobs report for November. In all, a weak, but sideways rather than negative, trend.
