Streak of Monthly U.S. Job Gains Will End In June

Being on vacation this week around the 4th, I will be keeping commentary to a bare minimum for our June non-farm payroll forecast – an unfortunate disservice to the magnitude of our forecast given that we project a loss of 25,000 jobs in the U.S. in June.

The dismal jobs report we’re predicting for Friday’s jobs report is based on the steep drop in new and total job listings in June from our paired-month data (where we measure month-over-month changes in job openings for companies that were hiring in both May and June).

June’s decline continues the downward trend we’ve seen all year in labor demand across the U.S.

As background, LinkUp is the leading provider of job market information and our job data is sourced entirely from corporate websites. Every day, LinkUp indexes millions of jobs directly from tens of thousands of corporate websites and as a result, our job market data is always current without any duplicate jobs or job board pollution.

Looking at our job market data as a whole, total job openings fell 1.3%, new job openings fell 5.6%, and removed jobs rose 5.8%.

Likewise, The LinkUp 10,000 dropped 0.5% in June. The LinkUp 10,000 is another one of a handful of our macro indicators that tracks job openings for the 10,000 employers in our dataset with the most job openings in a given month. By capping the set of employers at 10,000, we can normalize the data to account for the fact that we are continuously adding new companies to the index (albeit further and further down into the long-tail).

Hiring velocity also slowed down markedly in June as LinkUp’s Job Duration rose from 41 to 46 days. Job Duration measures how long job openings are open on average across the entire country before companies fill the position with a hire and remove the job fro their corporate website.

Based on the data for June, we are forecasting that the record-setting streak of monthly job gains will come to an end at 104 consecutive months with a loss of 25,000 jobs in June.

While we are, as usual, a severe outlier among Bloomberg forecasts….

…we take some measure of solace and comfort from our solid NFP Forecast track-record this year…

While we expect that May’s job gains will be revised upward in the 30 and 60 day revisions, we fully anticipate that June’s job gains will come in well below consensus estimates.

So in spite of the dismal news we expect Friday, we hope everyone has a great 4th of July.