South By North Strategies, Ltd.

From the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of the April version of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) …

The April Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, underscores the sluggishness of the recovery, showing that job openings declined by 325,000 in April. Given April’s drop in unemployment of 173,000 (unemployment data are from the Current Population Survey …), this means that the “job-seekers ratio”—the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings—increased by three tenths, to 3.7-to-1.
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Despite this increase, the ratio has been slowly but steadily improving since its peak of 6.7-to-1 in summer 2009, and it is likely that April’s increase represents month-to-month variability in the data rather than a reversal of that overall trend. However, the odds are still stacked strongly against job seekers; a job-seekers ratio above 3-to-1 means that for more than two out of three unemployed workers, there simply are no jobs.