LinkUp Forecasting Net Gain of 155,000 Jobs in March

It’s been a long while since we were so delinquent in getting our non-farm payroll forecast published, and at the 11th hour there isn’t much time for commentary, so we’ll dispense with it and get straight to LinkUp’s job market data and our forecast for the March jobs report.

Looking at our paired-month data for March, where we track job openings for all companies that are common in both February and March, new and total job openings from corporate websites rose 18% and 7% respectively, with solid gains in essentially every state.

Looking at the complete dataset of job openings in March, total job openings rose 8%, and new and removed jobs rose 29% and 32% respectively.

The LinkUp 10,000 also rose 9.4% in March. The LinkUp 10,000 tracks the job openings for the 10,000 employers in LinkUp’s dataset each month with the most job openings for any given month.

And lastly, LinkUp’s Job Duration analytic, which tracks how many days it takes for employers to fill positions with hires, rose from 46 days in February to 50 days in March. This metric, which essentially measures the velocity of hiring across the U.S. economy, has been steadily climbing since last fall as employers are finding it increasingly difficult to find applicants and/or hiring is starting to slow down.

Putting all our data together, we are forecasting a net gain of 155,000 jobs in March, below consensus forecast but up from a pretty dismal jobs report last month.