For both Washington politicians and Wall Street traders, the most eagerly anticipated day each month is 8:30 AM on the first Friday of the month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases their monthly jobs report.  This report can move both markets and polls.

At Bright, we have noticed a statistically significant and interesting correlation in recent months.  Bright aggregates about half of the jobs available in the United States at any given time in order to let job candidates search one of the largest databases of available jobs.   We have multiple job sources that span a large variety of industries.  In any given month, we have between 1.5 million and 2.5 million unique positions listed on Bright.

In 2012, we have seen a strong correlation between the number of jobs listed on Bright (a proxy for the total number of jobs being advertised) and the net jobs created in the U.S.  This is a very simplified metric as the rate of net job creation is actually the difference between two large numbers (around 4 million people start a new job each month, and about 4 million people leave their old job).  One would not expect the net job creation to be generally aligned with the number of active listings except in a labor market where there is a large supply of workers for every available job.  Unfortunately, that is our current situation.

For July, we have seen very robust advertising by employers — over 2.2 million unique jobs were listed on Bright.  If the correlation holds, we expect a pleasant surprise for the July job report this Friday, with over 200,000 net jobs created.  In the past months, job growth has been at anemic level (roughly 80K net jobs).  Here you can see how our model has behaved this year, along with our prediction for July.

David Hardtke, Chief Scientist, Bright

(david@bright.com)

Bright Labs, Employment Index