NEW YORK – About 3,947,100 online job postings appeared on leading Internet job boards in September, a decrease of 43,500 from August, The Conference Board reported Wednesday.
“In the last six months, labor demand has experienced a drop of 500,000, cutting sharply into the gain of 763,000 at the beginning of the year,” said June Shelp, vice president at The Conference Board. “This narrows the average monthly gain for 2011 to 29,000.” The slowdown, however, varies widely for different occupations. In legal occupations, labor demand stalled as early as the beginning of 2010, but in the last six months it has dropped 23 percent to 21,600 in September. In contrast, advertised vacancies for production workers gained steadily since mid-2009 until July 2011, but in the last two months, it dipped further. It is now down 10 percent to 117,000 in September."
The Supply/Demand rate for the U.S. in August (the latest month for which unemployment numbers are available) stood at 3.50, indicating that there are 3.5 unemployed workers for every online advertised vacancy. Nationally, there are 10 million (9.98 million) more unemployed workers than advertised vacancies.
