Online advertised job vacancies in July totaled 4,084,200 – 2.65 vacancies for every 100 persons in the labor force – or some 196,200 less than in June (down 4.6%, according to The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series (HWOL). But online advertised vacancies continue to be up substantially (20%) over the year (July ’06 – July ’07).
“The monthly decline in July in large part reflects the July 4th holiday week when ad volume dropped,” said Gad Levanon, Economist at The Conference Board. “Online job demand is running well above last year’s level, indicating that the national labor market continues to hold up.”
But The Conference Board Leading Economic Indicators “point to a little loss in momentum over the next few months. With the typical lagged response of the labor market, we may well see a moderation in national employment growth in the second half of the year while some of the hot local markets continue to show high ad rates and low unemployment,” he said.
Highlights from The Conference Board HWOL for July:
The National Picture
- Some 2,609,300 or 64% of the 4,084,200 unduplicated online advertised vacancies were new ads that did not appear in June, while the remainder were reposted ads from the previous month.
- Both total and new ads declined by 5% from the previous month. Over the year (July ’06 – July ’07) total ads and new ads rose 20% and 18%, respectively.
- The largest monthly decline was in the Middle Atlantic Census region (down 8 %). Except for the New England region, which dipped 0.2%, over the year July ’06 – July ’07 the other eight Census regions posted double-digit gains.
- The largest increases were in the Mountain (30%), West North Central (30%) and West South Central (38%) regions.
State Highlights
- Alaska posted 4.69 vacancies for every 100 persons in the state labor force, the highest rate in the nation, moving up from second place last month.
- Montana (4.65) and Nevada (4.61) were close behind in the number of advertised vacancies when adjusted for the size of the state labor force.
- Online advertised vacancies in California, the state with the largest labor force in the nation, totaled 662,600.
- The volume of online advertised vacancies in California was significantly above the next highest states, Texas (345,500), New York (272,500) and Florida (250,600).
- Using the latest unemployment data available from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and computing the supply/demand ratio (unemployed/advertised vacancies), the states with the most favorable (e.g., lowest) supply/demand rates included Montana (0.62), Idaho (0.70), and Wyoming (0.75).
- There were 11 states where the supply/demand rate was less than 1.0, indicating that the number of unemployed workers was less than the number of online job ads.
- States where the number of unemployed persons looking for work significantly exceeded the number of online advertised demand included Mississippi (4.97) and Michigan (4.47), Kentucky (3.41) and Arkansas (3.18).
Occupational Focus
- Occupations with substantial advertised online vacancies nationally were healthcare practitioner and technical workers (365,000) and management positions (358,700).
- Also in high demand are business and financial occupations (290,700), office and administrative support (286,300) and computer and mathematical (284,300) occupations.
- Management and Business/Financial occupations account for more than 25% of all of the online ads classified by occupation. They were most concentrated in New York (32%) and Illinois (31%), where ads for these occupations were almost one-third of the online advertised vacancies.
Metropolitan Areas
- The number of unemployed persons looking for work was less than the number of advertised vacancies in 23 of the 52 metro areas for which data is reported separately.
- The top-ranking areas were Salt Lake City, Austin, Washington D.C., Denver and Phoenix.
- Two of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, New York and Los Angeles, were first and second in the absolute volume of advertised job vacancies in July, with 276,400 and 233,300, respectively.
- The top two metro areas in terms of advertised vacancies per 100 persons in the local labor force were San Francisco (6.52) and San Jose (6.45), followed by Austin (5.95).
Note: The Help Wanted Online Data Series is a new developmental program with research and evaluation studies ongoing in a number of areas. The comparisons in the tables between total ads and total unemployed at the various geographic levels are overall counts and it cannot be inferred that the detailed occupation or geographic location of the unemployed matches the occupation or geographic location of the vacancy. Additionally, there may be differences in the way the unemployed person describes his occupation versus the way an employer may describe the same job.
