Introduction
Hey everyone! Welcome back to Recruiting Realities – the show where we break down the latest in recruitment and labor market news without the jargon overload. Today, we’re catching up again with our go-to labor market expert, David Garrett, to unpack the September 2024 jobs report.
Yazad Dalal: Hi everyone! I’m Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer here at Joveo, and welcome to Recruiting Realities, where we bring to you the latest developments and insights in recruitment. Today we’re speaking again with our own in-house labor market economist, David Garrett, about the US jobs report for September 2024. Hello David.
David Garrett: Hey, how’s it going?
Yazad Dalal: I’m well and for our listeners, at Joveo we publish Interactive Insights across all major occupations in the US. You can check that out on our website joveo.com/interactive-insights
Now David, the most recent US jobs report came out for the month of September. The US labor market gained an estimated 254,000 jobs. Well above the projected volume – I think they were predicting 140,000. Health care employment boomed. Leisure and hospitality, too. Construction and retail both added a significant number of jobs. I think manufacturing was the only major sector to lose jobs. And meanwhile, the unemployment rate declined to 4.1% from 4.2% last month. So David, I have lots of questions. Let’s get started. First of all, what was your sort of main key takeaways from the latest report?
David Garrett: Yeah, mean, for starters, I want listeners to also keep in mind that the data is subject to change as revisions come in. So, you know, this massive like 100,000 plus boost we saw above what we originally expected, it may decline a little bit. I doubt it will fully disappear, but it may go down as later months, the tallies kind of come back in. And given that the two previous months were also revised upwards in this last report, you know, I don’t think that any revisions would be significantly large. So I really think that last month was just much better than we expected. But either way, we’re continuing to see these strong hiring gains, low layoff numbers last month, plus there was actually an increase in hourly earnings, and inflation continues to trend downward. So, it’s all very promising that we are kind of in this sweet spot of where the labor market and things are cooling down, but still holding in there.
Yazad Dalal: And speaking of revisions, David, I read something recently about some other revisions that were made in the overall economic performance from last year for the US. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? What does it mean for us right now?
David Garrett: Yeah, so the short of it is that the BEA, you know, they revised their national accounts data all the way back from like 2019 through Q1 of 2024, as there was some improved data metrics and, you know, computational metrics or methods for calculating GDP and GDI. You know, and the importance of this is that it did narrow this sort of gap that economists were seeing between them, which is creating a lot of concern because it made it look as though GDP numbers were overstating the actual health of the economy. Things may have been worse than we thought. You know, it was hard to tell. And I think where things get interesting for us in the TA recruitment aspect is that the adjustment did show a downgrade in wages and salaries on incomes, which is far more consistent with those massive revisions we saw from the BLS to last year’s data. So, you know, based on data and things like that, I’m a pretty firm believer that you can’t really know where you’re going until you have a solid understanding of where you’ve been. So seeing the data become far more consistent across different aspects does really make me more hopeful that the labor market and overall economy is continuing to hold strong and that the Fed’s push to finally start lowering interest rates is going to continue helping us with this sweet spot like I mentioned earlier.
Yazad Dalal: The past is prologue. I love it, David. Well, thank you to you and thank you to our listeners. Don’t forget to visit us at Joveo.com and we’ll see you again soon.
David Garrett: Take care.
Conclusion
And that’s a wrap for this month’s labor market update. Thanks so much to Yaz and David for helping us make sense of it all. Remember, if you want to geek out on more job market insights, head over to our detailed reports. We’ll catch you next time with more recruitment realities – until then, take care and keep hiring smart!
