April tied the record for most job openings in the U.S., even as hiring fell again.
Employers listed 5.788 million advertised job vacancies in the month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday, up from 5.67 million the month before and the same peak that was reached in July of last year.
Those openings didn’t translate into hiring, however. Total hiring fell for a second month, from 5.29 million to 5.09 million. Hiring still hasn’t returned to the highs it had before the financial crisis.
The bureau had previously reported that the economy added a disappointing 123,000 new non-farm payroll jobs in April, and that job growth has slowed over the past three months.
In another sign of the labor market cooling off, the quits rate dropped in April, from 2.1 per 100 employees to 2.0. Higher quits are usually taken to mean a stronger job market, because they suggest that workers are confident enough in their prospects to leave their existing job.
The numbers released Wednesday come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, a survey that includes data on gross job creation, hiring and job losses. Government officials and investors favor the report because it contains more detail than the more widely noted monthly jobs report, even though it is released on a one-month lag.
Despite the slowdown in hiring in April, some analysts saw encouraging signs in the data.
With job openings at a record high, the slow hiring might “partly reflect scarcity of labour supply,” suggested Nordea Markets analyst Johnny Bo Jakobsen.
In other words, job growth might have slowed throughout the spring because the ranks of the available unemployed workers have thinned, not because companies are creating fewer posts.
One datapoint backing up that possibility is the fact that the ratio of unemployed workers for each advertised job remained at 1.4, lower than was typical during the housing boom and way down from the depths of the recession, when it peaked above six.
The job creation and hiring numbers from the survey are adjusted for seasonal variation.
