The presidential candidates have been eagerly awaiting the Bright Employment Index for October.  This is the last time Bright will publish this data before next Tuesday’s general election, and we expect our release of this data to greatly impact the vote of the undecided voter (singular intentional) in Ohio.  So, Sue from Ohio, we can tell you that the job market is about the same as it has been in recent months.

To recap, Bright aggregates active job listings  from many different places.  We typically have about 50 to 60% of the advertised available jobs in our searchable job database. In October, we had over 3 million unique job vacancies listed on Bright from a broad selection of employment sectors and all 50 states.  We have noticed this year that the number of active listings seems to correlate quite strongly with the net nonfarm payroll employment number published on the first Friday of the month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Our model calculates the correlation between vacancies on Bright and the previous BLS reports and uses this correlation model to predict the upcoming job report.  Based on our data, we expect the BLS to report 228,000 net jobs created last month.  Below, you can see how well our model correlates in recent months:

Interestingly, our model shows a significant departure last month from the preliminary BLS employment report data for September 2012.  We expect our model to be within 50,000 jobs of the BLS number, but last month’s departure is significantly larger.  If the correlation between vacancies and net job creation holds, we expect the BLS to report an upward revision for the September numbers tomorrow — the BLS provides two preliminary measurements before finalizing the nonfarm payroll number for a given month (i.e. the August 2012 number will be finalized tomorrow, and there will be a revision of the September 2012 number).

David Hardtke, Ph.D., Chief Scientist

Bright Labs, Employment Index