The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey - Capturing Hire and Separation Rates
About
The availability of unfilled jobs - the job opening rate - is an important measure of the tightness of job markets, parallel to existing measures of unemployment.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) was created to serve as demand-side indicators of labor shortages at the national level.
The number of job openings was at a series high of 11.5 million on the last business day of March 2022, per the latest JOLTS news release. The number of quits rose in March, establishing a new historic high point of 4.5 million workers leaving jobs.
What is JOLTS?
JOLTS data serves as an economic indicator of the unmet labor demand with which to assess the presence or extent of labor shortages.
Data from a sample of approximately 16,000 U.S. business establishments are collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) through the JOLTS Data Collection Center.
JOLTS collects data on total employment, job openings, hires, quits, layoffs & discharges, and other separations.
What do JOLTS Summaries and Data Releases Tell Us?
Releases contain estimates of the number of, and rate of, job openings, hires and separations for the nonfarm industry sectors by industry and by geographic region.
Job openings are surveyed for changes in levels on the last business day of February. Over the month, hires and separations are also measured to give an idea of job turnover.
For more information on the JOLTS, see the JOLTS overview page. You can access the JOLTS database directly online.
Latest JOLTS news and data releases are issued in the following formats.
Please see also:
- Job Openings and Labor Turnover Data (HTML)
- JOLTS Technical Note
- JOLTS Graphs and Highlights
- Significant Change Tables
- JOLTS Archived Data Releases
- JOLTS Significant Change Tables, Graphs and Highlights
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- Resource Publication Date: 2009
- Posted by: Germell Hosch
- Posted in: LMI Central