Pasadena, CA -- (SBWire) -- 10/11/2010 -- A report from the Labor Department shows that employers advertised a total of 3.2 million job openings in August.
The report, called JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) shows the amount of job churn in the country’s economy every month. The employer advertisements for hiring show that this was the highest level of available jobs since April. Most economists say that hiring happens 30 to 90 days after the openings are announced. The total number of new hires in both government and private sector hit 4.1 million in August.
On another positive note, the Labor Department reported that the weekly initial jobless benefits claims fell to their lowest level in almost three months. There were 445,000 first time filings in the week ending October 2. But the unemployment rate has remained at 9.6 percent.
The reasons being given are that most of the job losses were in the construction and manufacturing sectors. The laid off workers do not have skills to work in the newer job growth sectors such as healthcare and education. Lack of geographical mobility is another reason that is given for the persistently high unemployment rate.
A. Harrison Barnes, CEO of EmploymentCrossing, says that he believes in the Labor Department’s estimate of the number of job openings. “We are a job aggregator company, and we have been able to find almost 700,000 jobs in the last seven days. So the Labor Department is not completely off the mark, even though some may find the figures hard to believe.”
Labor Department SaysJob Openings Rose for Second Straight Month; Employmentcrossing Finds 700,000 Jobs