South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The latest version of the  Job Openings and Labor Turnover Surveyconducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that job openings remained scarce in January, the most recent month for which data are available. As the Economic Policy Institute noted in its analysis of the data:

This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the January report from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), showing that job openings increased by 193,000 to 2.7 million in January (including an upward revision of 34,000 to earlier data).  From the Current Population Survey, we know that the number of unemployed workers decreased in January by 430,000 to 14.8 million.  This means there was substantial improvement in the ratio of job seekers per job opening, which dropped from 6.0 in December to 5.4 in January.  As the figure shows, there is a good deal of month-to-month volatility in this ratio, but nevertheless January marked the largest one-month improvement in the history of the series.  At 5.4, the number of unemployed workers per job opening is the lowest it has been since March of last year.   However, it remains almost twice as high as the worst month of the recession of the early 2000s, when it peaked at 2.8.