The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) slipped to 128.69 in November from an upwardly revised 129.75 in October, and is up 2.7% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The October number was originally reported as 129.48.
"Despite the strong numbers on job creation in the past few months, the Employment Trends Index posted the largest one month decline since the Great Recession, with five of the eight components contributing negatively to the index," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. " While two of the components – initial claims for unemployment and our forecast of job openings – suggest modest adverse developments, their levels are still healthy. However, the past month's weakness in consumer confidence in job growth and the slowdown in temporary help needs careful watching. Overall, there is reason for caution to not linearly extrapolate the current strong growth into 2016."
The slip in ETI was driven by negative contributions from five of its eight components.
The decreasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," job openings, initial claims for unemployment insurance, and number of temporary employees, according to the Conference Board.
The ETI aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out so-called "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.
The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the ETI include: Percentage of respondents who say they find "Jobs Hard to Get" (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey); Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor); Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation); Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics); Part-time Workers for Economic Reasons (BLS); Job Openings (BLS); Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board); and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis).
