Economy

Online Job Openings Not Growing as Much as Payrolls

Jon C. Ogg

Published: February 3, 2016 11:40 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 1:41 pm

Does anyone get a job the old-fashioned way these days? One measurement of the jobs market is via the online advertised jobs vacancies. The Conference Board has released its Help Wanted Online (HWOL) figures for January, showing that the online job postings rose by 13,500 to 5,496,500.

The Conference Board showed that the December supply and demand rate was at 1.44 unemployed for each advertised vacancy, with a total of 2.4 million more unemployed workers than the number of advertised vacancies. The number of unemployed was roughly 7.9 million in December.

A breakdown of these jobs was seen as follows for the month of January:

• Professional category saw large gains in computer/math (+29.0) and health care (+24.2) with small gains in most other categories.
• Services and production category saw large losses in sales (-20.5) and food (-7.7) with a mixture of small gains and losses in the other categories.

Some economic reports are followed by economists and investors. This is generally not one of those reports. Still, this is a component of the larger jobs market and can be used to see how the flow of jobs really moves. The Conference Board was not impressed at all here:

January showed a disappointing start for 2016. Labor demand levels remain very high but growth has continued to be slow since 2013.

There was one warning here in how the data may look different from month to month. January’s data incorporated updated seasonal adjustment factors, and the February data will incorporate the HWOL annual revisions.

Among the largest states, 13 of them rose and seven posted losses in January. For all 50 states, 27 rose and 23 declined. By region these were as follows:

• Midwest experienced an increase of 8,400 in January.
• Northeast declined 18,200 in January.
• West increased 15,100 in January.
• South increased 4,300.