With the 1st of the month falling on the Thursday before ‘Jobs Friday,’ we will be posting our non-farm payroll (NFP) forecast and jobs report for May in two parts this week. This shortened first post will include just the NFP forecast for May because we only use job openings data from the previous month to forecast job growth the following month (given the fact that job openings in a given month are highly correlated to job gains in the following month when employers, for the most part, fill those positions with new hires).

As we reported last month, new job openings on LinkUp in April declined 5% and total job openings were flat for the month.

With a 50/50 blended decline of 2.4% in April, we are forecasting net gains of just 160,000 jobs in May.

When we get our data for the full month of May on Thursday, June 1st, we will publish May’s job openings data (which also allows us to make a preliminary forecast for June NFP) as well as our job duration report for May.