By Charles Thibault on February 22, 2010 in BLS Nonfarm Employment.

WANTED Technologies expects the BLS will report a small gain of 5,000 nonfarm workers when it releases its Februrary 2010 Employment Situation on Friday, March 5, 2010, at 8:30 a.m. (EST).

• Hiring Demand has stabilized and changes in employment will fluctuate around zero. The following graph tracks new online jobs, daily, over the past 4 months. Notice the periodic weekend dip when workers aren't at their office to post jobs. Jobs have been trending upward at a steady rate, about 0.5% a week.

• There were 10,700 more online job ads on major US national employment websites on February 15th compared to January 14th (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs), a 2.4% increase in Hiring Demand. The growth rate did flatten compared to last month, but at least it has been positive/above zero for last the 4 months – labor demand is growing.

• New UI Claims are flat compared to last month. However, they were on a fairly aggressive downward trend before growing for two consecutive weeks. The S&P 500 Index also fell 4.5% during that period. Continued Claims fell by about 50,000 compared to two weeks ago, suggesting that there has been at least some absorption of unemployed workers in the past month.

Comments are closed.