Jobs Online Increase During May

The number of advertised jobs online increased by hundreds of thousands during May.

The Conference Board recently released its Help-Wanted Online Data Series for April, which found that online advertised vacancies increased by 250,000 to 3,367,000 during May. This gain was the first since October 2008, when online vacancies increased by 21,000, and the largest gain since October 2006. Even so, advertised vacancies were down by 1,152,000, or 25 percent, since last year.

Online advertised vacancies increased in 43 of the 50 states during May. During the last four months, New Jersey, Florida, Georgia, Maryland and Hawaii either saw labor demand level or slightly increase. Among the 20 most populous states, the number of unemployed people outnumbered advertised vacancies, on a range of 2 to 1 in Maryland to 9 to 1 in Michigan.

"The May bounce in labor demand is a very welcome sign," Gad Levanon, senior economist at The Conference Board, said. "April and May are both months when businesses typically step up their demand for workers. This year, while April was weak, by May employers were placing ads for workers in numerous locations across the nation. Over the last four months, there are now about a half dozen states where the drop in labor demand shows signs of leveling off and another handful of states show some very moderate increases.

"Labor demand typically leads the trend in both employment and unemployment, so positive signals on labor demand are always important," he added. "Even with the current positive signs, the likely outlook is for unemployment to continue to rise and employment to fall at more modest levels throughout the summer. In April (the latest unemployment data until the May numbers are released this Friday), there were 10.6 million more unemployed workers than advertised vacancies."