The Labor Department reported this morning that U.S. jobs creation slowed in March to its feeblest pace in more than a year. They said that
Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 126,000 jobs in March, which was its smallest gain since December 2013. They also said that the unemployment rate remained unchanged in March at 5.5%.
However, as I shared in my last post “Women and Minority Hiring Makes Good Business Sense!“ their figures from last week showed that fewer people sought unemployment benefits, which is a major indicator of accelerating jobs creation! Included were: a) weekly applications for jobless aid falling 9,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 282,000 b) the four-week average of jobless claims falling 7,750 to 297,000 and c) over the past 12 months, that average has tumbling about 7 percent!
Additionally, our executive recruiting firm has observed anecdotally over the past five months that hiring has accelerated for many staff-level R&D, scientific, engineering, technical, IT and manufacturing positions. Moreover, many technical recruiting, engineering recruiting, R&D recruiting, scientific recruiting, IT recruiting and manufacturing recruiting firms that we recently polled also shared this view.
So which figures are most accurate? There appears to be a major disconnect among jobs figures at the Labor Department.
What are your thoughts?
