Janet Yellen's favorite labor market indicator the JOLTS survey showed record job openings and hires in June as the Wall Street Journal picked up on a theme that I pointed out months ago. The ratio of hires to job openings has been steadily falling. They attributed it to one of the causes I pointed out a year ago when I first featured this issue. That is that employers can't find workers to fill the jobs they are offering because workers don't have the skills employers need. However, the analysts the WSJ cited all felt that the growing number of job openings was a bullish sign.

The Journal failed to mention the other cause–that the jobs being offered are so crappy and so low paying, nobody wants to take them.  As I wrote a year ago and have alluded to frequently since:

… in spite of skyrocketing job openings, those jobs are not the kinds of jobs that real people, with their existing levels of skills, can fill, nor can they ever fill. There just aren't that many rocket scientists and financial engineers available in the work force. Yes, that's sarcasm. The biggest increase in openings has been in low paid restaurant and hotel jobs, which is just as much a problem. The US economy is beset with a huge, multi directional skills mismatch.”

So the growing number of job openings is not a good thing.

Job Openings Continue to Grow

Another thing that the WSJ ignores is that the number of job openings is rising BECAUSE of these factors. An increase in the number of openings of menial, low paying jobs is therefore meaningless. Job openings will continue to grow and the ratio of hires to openings will continue to fall endlessly under these conditions because the vast majority of jobs being offered can't be filled and won't be filled. They're either not real jobs because nobody has the skills to fill them, or they're not real because they don't pay a living wage. Or maybe they're just not real job postings, period.