The LinkUp 10,000 Dropped Another 1% Again Yesterday

One of the many data points we’re scrutinizing closely these days to monitor the U.S. labor market is The LinkUp 10,000. We publish the LinkUp 10,000 every day on our site, but we thought it would be worth highlighting it on our blog at least once a week given how effective it is as a macro indicator of labor demand across the entire U.S. economy as well as a predictor of job growth in future periods.

The LinkUp 10,000 is an analytic we developed quite some time ago to account for the fact that we are always adding new companies and new jobs to our job search engine and our job data. To normalize the data for the addition of new companies and employers of all types (public and private companies, non-profits, government employers, etc.), The LinkUp 10,000 tracks the total number of job openings for the 10,000 global employers with the most job openings in the U.S. on any given day.

Given COVID-19’s devastating impact on the U.S. economy in general and employment in particular, it not surprising to see that labor demand across the entire economy has been decimated as well. We detailed the steep declines we saw in our data for March last week, and the declines have continued unabated in April.

The LinkUp 10,000 dropped 1.2% yesterday and is down 16.1% in the past 30 days.

While we’re all scrutinizing the COVID-19 stats for positive signs as to when we might see light at the end of the tunnel, we’re also monitoring the predictive signals in The LinkUp 10,000 for signs that employers are starting to gear up to begin hiring again. On both fronts, those days cannot arrive soon enough.