LinkUp Forecasting Net Gain of 50,000 Jobs in December

With time running short until Friday’s jobs report for December, we’ll keep the commentary to a minimum (as in, non-existent) and jump straight into LinkUp’s job market data for last month and our non-farm payroll (NFP) forecast for December.

Total U.S. jobs indexed directly from company websites dropped 5% in December while new and removed jobs dropped 9% and 6% respectively. With December’s decline, labor demand (as measured by the total number of U.S. job openings posted on company websites globally indexed daily by LinkUp) dropped in 8 of 12 months during the year.

And since September, total job openings have dropped 17%, new job openings have dropped 31%, and removed jobs have dropped 19%. During that stretch, the number of jobs removed from company websites has exceed the number of new jobs posted on company websites by 1.04M - an average of 260,000 per month. At 4.6M, job openings now sit at the level they were in mid-February of 2021.

Even more alarming is the fact that that delta between removed and new openings openings has grown from 180,000 job openings in September to 315,000 in December. And while roughly 60% of the jobs removed were done so because the opening was filled with a new hire, it is clear that the gradual cooling of the job market that we’ve seen over the past two year is at risk of turning into a deep-freeze.

Similar to the chart above, the LinkUp 10,000 - a metric that tracks the total U.S. job openings from the 10,000 global employers with the most openings in the U.S., dropped 5% in December.

Job openings dropped in every state in the U.S. except Alaska which rose a scant 0.6%. The largest declines in labor demand were seen in Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Labor demand fell in every industry except Retail - General Merchandise and Management of Companies. The largest declines were seen in Utilities, Real Estate, and Arts/Entertainment/Recreation.

Even worse, labor demand by occupation declined in every single ONET Occupation category, with the worst declines seen in Computer and Math, Life/Physical/Social Science, and Production.

Not surprisingly, hiring velocity slowed considerably in December as the average time-to-fill (as measured by our Closed Duration metric) rose from 46 to 50 days. Closed Duration measures the number of days an opening, on average, is open on a company’s corporate career portal before it is removed.

Because our data is inherently forward-looking due to the fact that a job listing signals a company’s intent to fill that opening with a hire in the future, our non-farm payroll for December is based on our data from November. As such, given the fact that new and total jobs dropped 11% and 6% respectively in November, we are forecasting a net gain of just 50,000 jobs in December.

As mentioned at the outset, we’ll provide more detailed analysis of the job market along with some commentary in the next few days, but suffice it to say that we’re in for some turbulence in 2024.

And lastly, just because it’s awesome, here’s the new state flag for Minnesota.

Happy New Year.