February 8, 2012 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Job openings in December

There were 3.4 million job openings on the last business day of December, up from 3.1 million in November.


[Chart data]

Although the number of job openings remained below the 4.4 million openings when the recession began in December 2007, the number of job openings has increased 39 percent since the end of the recession in June 2009.

The job openings rate—2.5 percent in December—has trended upward since the end of the recession in June 2009, when the job openings rate was 1.8 percent.

These data are from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey and are seasonally adjusted. For more information see "Job Openings and Labor Turnover — December 2011" (HTML) (PDF), news release USDL-12-0214. Data for the most recent month are preliminary. The job openings rate is the number of job openings on the last business day of the month as a percent of total employment plus job openings.

Related TED articles

Employment

 

For citation purposes, this TED article is archived at:
www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2012/ted_20120208.htm

 

Of interest

Spotlight on Statistics: The Recession of 2007–2009

The most recent recession in the United States began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, though many of the statistics that describe the U.S. economy have yet to return to their pre-recession values. In this Spotlight, we present BLS data that compare the recent recession to previous recessions. Read more »