Hiring in December hit a level not seen since before the recession began in late 2007, the Labor Department reported Tuesday.
Adjusting for seasonal fluctuations, there were 5.148 million total hires in the month, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That was the most since November 2007, one month before the recession officially began in December 2007 and the financial crisis began to unfold.
The number of job openings also hit the highest levels of the recovery, at just over 5 million.
Advertised job vacancies have spiked by over a quarter over the past year and are nearing the 2002 level of 5.2 million, which was the highest mark since the BLS began keeping track.
There are now just 1.7 unemployed workers for each job opening, a post-recession low. That ratio peaked near 7 at the worst moments of the jobs crisis in 2009.
The quits rate, at 1.9 percent, was mostly unchanged from November and slightly below the long-term average of roughly 2.1 percent. The number of people quitting their jobs did tick up from 2.66 million to 2.72 million.
Tuesday’s JOLTS report follows an encouraging jobs report released Friday that placed net job gains at 257,000. For the past three months, the economy has averaged 336,000 jobs created, a significant acceleration from the earlier pace of the jobs recovery that began in late 2010.
The JOLTS data on gross job creation, released a month after the more widely watched jobs report, are among the factors that Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen and her colleagues at the central bank watch for signs of the labor market’s strength.
Yellen has said that the overall unemployment rate is the single best metric of the health of the economy. At 5.7 percent, the unemployment rate is not far from the rate that Fed officials think is consistent with a healthy economy.
Yet most central bankers and private-sector economists believe that the unemployment rate, right now, presents a slightly rosier picture of the jobs market than is warranted, because in the wake of the recession, there are large numbers of people who have dropped the job search entirely or settled for part-time work. Those workers’ underemployment would not be reflected in the unemployment rate.
Rising job openings and hiring rates are positive signs for business and employment.
Similarly, quits are taken as good news because they suggest that workers are confident enough in their job prospects to leave one job and test the market.
