Job openings are absolutely surging while hiring is falling further
behind. Openings jumped 1.7 percent in July to 6.939 million to easily
top Econoday's consensus range. Hires, after posting a 1.2 percent
decline in June, came in unchanged in July at 5.679 million.
Year-on-year,
openings are up 11.9 percent with hirings up only 3.3 percent with this
reading now having fallen for three months in a row. The widening gap
between openings and hires strongly suggests that employers are having
the hard time finding employees with the right qualifications.
The
number of openings, for the first time on record, moved past the number
of people actively looking for work in March this year. This gap also
keeps widening and stood at 659,000 in July and raises the risk of wage
pressures as slack disappears in the available workforce.
Another
sign of pressure, one watched by Jerome Powell, is the quits rate in
this report which, up 1 tenth to 2.4 percent, is on the rise and what
points to increasing willingness of those with jobs to look for better
work.
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