Job listings Fall in April

With the economy struggling, job listings posted online have been falling. Employers simply can’t afford to hire as many new staff members due the fact that a large portion of the population can’t afford the services or goods they sell. According to The Conference Board this decline in positions posted with various online job search engines caused their Employment Trends Index (ETI) to fall again in April.

On May 11th the Conference Board released it Employment Trends Index for the previous month. In the press release the Board announced that the Index fell 0.7 percent from March’s 90.1 to 89.5 percent. This is down 22 percent from the same month in 2008.

"The outlook for employment is much less negative than in prior months, but still it is not likely that employment growth will resume before the final quarter of the year," said The Conference Board’s Senior Economist Gad Levanon in the release. "In April, the Employment Trends Index recorded its smallest decline since June 2008, and three of its eight components actually showed an improvement."

Using eight separate verified labor-market indicators, the Conference Board manages to make its ETI more accurate. By complying all of this different data the Board is able to get a larger picture, remove incongruent information, and isolate underlying trends more accurately.

According to the Conference Board, three of the eight labor-market indicators showed some signs of improvement. These were the initial claims for unemployment insurance, part-time workers for economic reasons and the percentage of participants who say that they have found employment hard to come by.

The eight areas that come together to create the index are: the percentage of people polled who say that finding a job is difficult (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey), Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor), the number of employees hired on a temporary basis (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), the percentage of firms that are not able to fill positions at the time (National Federation of Independent Business), the number of people hired by temp agencies (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), part-time workers hired for Economic Reasons (BLS), job listings (BLS), Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board) and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis).

The next Conference Board Employment Trends Index will be release on Monday, June 8th at 10 am, which is the Monday following the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment situation report.