You could see the gap between hires and openings – as well as the time it takes to fill jobs – as signs employers are being more selective, which would be a drag on labor market vitality. The number of available jobs rose in manufacturing; professional and business services, which includes engineering and management consulting; and government.
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Construction hires remained steady in March at a seasonally adjusted 5.1%, a 20 basis-point gain year-over-year. In terms of layoffs, in March, the South saw an all-time low for firings relative to its labor force while Midwestern states saw a spike in firings; still, that regional rate remains well below recent highs let alone recessionary conditions.
“This is especially encouraging in the light of the plunge in the stock market in January and early February, which we thought would depress hiring plans for a time”, Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics said in a research report sent to clients. The rise lifted the jobs openings rate to 3.9 percent, up from the 3.8 percent recorded in February. Despite an increase in new opportunities, job growth seems to be slowing from the steady pace of 232,000 new jobs per month reported over the past few months. The metric, which is a preferred indicator for Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, will sustain a degree of uncertainty regarding the Fed’s ability to raise interest rates in the near future. A higher share of quitters suggests two things: optimism that another job will be relatively easy to find and confidence that it will pay more. It expanded at just a 1 percent annual pace from October through March.
Data on the number of job openings in the USA during March, excluding the farming industry, was released yesterday. Job openings decreased 80,000 in retail trade. That meant that the net job gain in retail in March was 39,000.
The hiring rate came in at 3.7%for the month.
The March turnover rate was similar to February’s at 3.5% or five million total separations.
So more quitting is generally a good sign for the economy.
Rising oil prices played a role in snapping the losing streak in sales and inventories. That’s below the all-time high for gross job openings set previous year but the trend higher in openings after some moderation in the second half of 2015 suggests labor demand continues to climb. That helped slow economic growth to 0.6% at an annual rate following a tepid 1.4% gain in the fourth quarter.
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Information for this article was contributed by Christopher S. Rugaber and Paul Wiseman of The Associated Press, and by Shobhana Chandra of Bloomberg News.
