The 103,000 jobs that quietly disappeared
The unemployment rate went down in July. That's the bad news. Friday's jobs report was the kind of thing that makes economists reach for a second coffee. The unemployment rate impr
The unemployment rate went down in July. That's the bad news.
Friday's jobs report was the kind of thing that makes economists reach for a second coffee. The unemployment rate improved. Employment did not. Both of those are true, and understanding why is worth more to your job search than any listicle about "power verbs for your résumé."
What actually happened
The US economy shed 23,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in July. Economists had penciled in a gain of roughly 83,000. So the number missed by about 106,000 jobs, which in forecasting terms is less a miss and more a different sport.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, ticked down to 4.1% from 4.2%.
How? Because the rate is a fraction, and the denominator is shrinking. Labor force participation slid to 61.4%, a level the US hasn't seen in over five years, and it's down 0.7 percentage points since January alone. People aren't finding jobs at a faster clip. They're leaving the count.
Then there are the revisions, which are where the real damage lives. May's job growth was revised down from 129,000 to 63,000. June went from 57,000 to 20,000. Combined, that's 103,000 jobs that were reported earlier this year and then quietly deleted.
Also worth noting: temporary layoffs jumped by 153,000 to 921,000, and the long-term unemployed, meaning people out of work for 27 weeks or more, now make up 25.5% of everyone unemployed. One in four.
The phrase you need to know: low-hire, low-fire
If you only take one concept away, take this one.
June's JOLTS data put job openings at 7.4 million, the hiring rate at 3.4%, the quits rate at 2.0%, and the layoff rate at 1.1%. Every one of those lines came in essentially flat. Economists have been calling this a low-hire, low-fire market for over a year now, and Indeed's Hiring Lab compared it to a duck on a pond: placid up top, paddling frantically underneath.
Here's the part that matters to you. That 2.0% quits rate isn't just a statistic about other people's career decisions. When nobody quits, nobody creates a backfill. Most job openings in a normal market exist because somebody else left. Take that away and the pipeline of "regular" openings dries up, even when layoffs stay low and the headline unemployment rate looks perfectly respectable.
So the market isn't collapsing. It's congealing. Which, if you're the one applying, feels roughly the same.
Not all of you are in the same labor market
The averages are hiding some genuinely wild dispersion.
Health care kept adding workers in July while local government education dropped about 50,000 jobs and retail trade lost 19,000. Warehouse clubs, supercenters and general merchandise alone shed 21,000 positions.
And tech deserves its own paragraph, because it's having a distinctly worse year than everybody else. Information-sector job openings are down roughly 33% year over year, the steepest drop of any private sector, and the quits rate among tech workers has fallen to the lowest point in the history of the series. Earlier this year, the layoff rate in information climbed from 1.3% to 2.4%, nearly five times the national average.
Translation: tech workers are being laid off more than average and are less able to move voluntarily than at any point on record. If you're a software engineer who feels like the market has personally singled you out, congratulations, you're not paranoid. You're just correctly reading a chart nobody put on the evening news.
Meanwhile, wages went nowhere. Average hourly earnings rose two cents to $37.62, and the annual increase slipped to 3.2%, the smallest since May 2021.
What to actually do about it
Stop waiting for the market to turn. The Fed is split, forecasts range from three cuts to a hike, and nobody in that argument is going to hire you. Your timeline and the macro timeline are unrelated.
Go where the hiring still is. Health care has been the reliable engine all year. The dispersion between sectors right now is bigger than the dispersion between good and bad candidates, which means the sector you point at matters more than the polish on your bullet points.
Move faster than 27 weeks. One in four unemployed Americans has crossed the long-term line, and every study on the subject says callback rates fall the longer you're out. Volume early beats perfectionism early.
If you're employed, know what you're sitting on. A 2.0% quits rate means most of your colleagues have decided that staying put is the safe play. That's rational, and it also means the few people who do move face less competition than usual for the openings that exist.
And target harder. Fewer openings means each application carries more weight. Sending the same résumé to 200 listings was a bad strategy in a hot market. In this one, it's just a slow way to feel terrible about yourself.
Vayme matches live US openings against your actual experience and writes the tailored CV, cover letter and pitch for each one. Fewer applications, better aimed, in a market where aim is the whole game.
