The number of new job openings slowed during the summer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday, and new vacancies are lower in August than anytime since December.
There were 5.4 million open job positions in August, the agency reported, down by nearly 400,000 from July.
That statistic came from the Bureau’s Job Openings and Labor Turnovery Survey, a release that comes out on a month lag from the monthly payroll jobs report but still commands attention among policymakers and investors because of the detail it provides on gross job creation, hiring and layoffs.
While creation of new posts disappointed, the overall picture was not much changed, since hiring and layoffs were roughly the same as they were in July. That is good news for workers to the extent that there were just 1.4 unemployed workers for every advertised vacancy. That ratio was close to the lows of the summer and below where it was during the housing bubble, pre-crisis. For comparison, there were nearly seven unemployed workers for every open job during the worst of the recession.
While job creation appeared to have taken a hit in August, the jobs report for the month showed that 167,000 net payroll jobs were added in the month, thanks in part to low levels of layoffs and firings. That number is more than enough to keep the unemployment rate trending down.
