The JOLTS survey, which decomposes the employment market into openings, hires, quits, and layoffs, was reported this morning for March. The question over the past year has been whether they best describe a “soft landing”, or “hard” one ending in recession, and that concern has been greatly exacerbated by the actions of the new Administration.

Additionally, several components are slight leading indicators for jobless claims, unemployment and wage growth.

In March the news remained mainly good, as the only measure which did not improve was the “soft” metric of openings.

To begin with, here are openings, hires, and quits all normed to 100 as of just before the pandemic:

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Openings, which are “soft” data and have generally uptrended going all the way back to the turn of the Millennium, remain above their pre-pandemic levels, but this is not terribly significant. Both hires and quits fell below their pre-pandemic levels at the beginning of 2024. But the past 12 months of data show stabilization - a good sign of a “soft landing” in process:

(Click on image to enlarge)

Openings did show some deterioration this month, but are well within the zone of noise over the past 12 months. Meanwhile hires have been very stable since last July, and Quits rose to close to a 12 month high this month, although they too are within their range of noise.

Last month one item of concern was layoffs and discharges, which increased to their highest level in almost two years excluding last September. This month that completely reversed, as quits fell to nearly a 12 month low:

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This is of a piece with the downtick in new jobless claims in April. (red, right scale), which typically follow with a short lag.

Finally, here is the update on the quits rate (left scale) vs. the YoY% change in average hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers (red, right scale) which it tends to lead:

(Click on image to enlarge)

Although the quits rate improved in March from 2.0% to 2.1%, it did downshift during 2024. Since average hourly wages tend to follow, but have not yet reflected that downshift, despite this month’s increase in Quits, the likelihood is that wage growth will decelerate further on a YoY basis over the next few months.

The message of this morning’s JOLTS report is that the “soft landing” was intact through March, with the likely attenuation in future wage gains its only (slightly) negative component. Unfortunately since then we have endured Tariff April.

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