The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) dipped to 127.65 in March from an upwardly revised 127.77 in February, and is up 5.6% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The February number was originally reported as 127.76.
"The growth in the Employment Trends Index slowed down in the first quarter of 2015," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "The combination of the disappointing March employment report and the recent weakness in the ETI suggests that the likelihood of a slowdown in employment has increased. Even so, it is unlikely that job growth in the second quarter would fall much below the trend of 200,000 jobs per month."
The drop in ETI was driven by negative contributions from three of its eight components.
The decreasing indicators - from the largest contributor to the smallest - were percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers and percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," 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).
