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Not Much Improvement Expected in June Jobs Report

Jul 5, 2011
This article is part of a series called News & Trends.

Indeed’s monthly job trends numbers are out, and if they are any indication of what’s ahead this week when official employment numbers are released, the news is going to be, ahem, mixed.

On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department will release its monthly employment report for June. Surveys of economists put June’s job in range from the 100,000 predicted by Bloomberg News to Marketwatch’s more optimistic 115,000.

Better than the 54,000 new jobs in May, the estimates are still well below the 182.2 thousand average of the first four months of the year. As a result, economists are not expecting any change in the 9.1 percent unemployment rate.

ADP’s National Employment Report, due out Thursday, will offer some guidance about the magnitude of the growth. Even though the  reports measure employment differently, and rarely track perfectly, ADP report is closely watched by analysts and investors for signs of what to expect in the government’s Friday report.

Consumers, however, have their own opinion of the direction of the economy, and it is decidedly negative. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index declined again in June to 58.5 from May’s revised 61.7.

Multiple measures make up the Index, among them consumers’ opinion of job availability. The Conference Board, which released the June index last week, reports:

Consumers’ assessment of the job market was also less favorable. Those stating jobs are “hard to get” increased to 43.8 percent from 43.5 percent, while those stating jobs are “plentiful” decreased to 5.2 percent from 5.7 percent.

Another report from The Conference Board, and Indeed’s monthly report, showed the number of jobs posted online decreased from May to June. The Conference Board’s Help Wanted OnLine series, which tracks the number of new and continuing jobs posted on thousands of sites in the U.S., decreased by 99,700.

Indeed, which tracks 13 employment sectors, reported a slight decrease in the total number of jobs in these categories during the month. Most sectors showed a slight growth in postings during the month, but a 4 percent decline in the healthcare job postings brought down the totals overall.

Human resources jobs declined by 1 percent. The number of searches on Indeed for HR and HR-related jobs was unchanged during the month. “Human resources”, “human resource,” and “HR” lead the keyword searches with 861,000. “Recruiter” was a distant second, with 107,890 searches.

This article is part of a series called News & Trends.