- by New Deal democrat
The JOLTS report is low on my list of useful tools, but it does break down the labor market further than the jobs report, and it does have several slightly leading components, so let’s take a look at the latest report, which is for April.
Below are job openings (blue), hires (red), and quits (gold) through April, all normed to 100 as of the onset of the pandemic:
Job openings seem to get the lion’s share of attention from most commentators, but I treat them as somewhat fictional, because there are legions of permanent or fictitious job vacancy ads. That being said, they rose sharply, by 731,000 to a nearly two year high of 7.618 million - which mind you follows March’s second lowest number since the pandemic. On the other hand, hires declined -419,000 to 5.116 million, their 3rd lowest reading since the pandemic; and quits also declined, by -183,000, to 2.977 million, their *lowest* reading since the pandemic.
Layoffs and discharges, which had rebounded sharply from their lowest numbers of 2025 in March, took it all back in April, declining -192,000 to 1.692 million:
This is consistent with the extremely low level of new jobless claims (red, right scale) (which are both more timely and much less noisy) we have seen since November, including a new 50+ year low at the end of April.
Finally, the quits rate (blue) tends to lead the YoY gain in hourly nonsupervisory wages (red). Here is the post-pandemic close-up of the last four years:
The quits rate has alternated between 1.9% and 2.0% for the past nine months. This counts as suggests that YoY wage growth is likely to continue to be stabile in the 3.5%-3.8% range for the next several months. But keep in that wage growth is a lagging indicator, which typically does not abate until a recession is already at hand.
In short, I would ignore the job openings number. As of April, this has remained a low-hire, low-fire, and low-quits economy.
