Hiring ticked up 2.5% in May, but after two years of decline it's still well below its pre-pandemic trend:
Hiring looks to be leveling out a bit, which is sort of consistent with the soft landing hypothesis. We can hope.
3 thoughts on “Hiring is still down from from its pre-pandemic level”
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Starting the pre-pandemic trend in 2012 it doesn't seem reasonable to me. The unemployment rate in 2012 was much higher than it is today. The economy had to do some "extra" hiring in order to bring us back down to sub-4% unemployment.
I know there's disagreement (broadly and within the Jabberwocking commentariat) about how low the unemployment rate can or should get, but I do think we all agree that *at some point* it's not sustainable for hiring to increase faster than the rate of the working age population.
I think we've already reached that point with respect to native-born population. The difference is made up of immigrants. If immigration slows, there has to be a slowdown in new jobs.
However, Kevin is referring to hires, which is a different thing. In the immediate post-pandemic economy there was a lot of churn. Both hiring and leaving went up due to people voluntarily leaving their jobs for better ones. This has distorted the curve. Kevin loves to draw straight trendlines, even when he shouldn't.
Out of curiosity, why are farms excluded from labor data? Aren't farm jobs still jobs?