This post was originally published on this site
Every month, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which is considered the gold standard of labor market data. But recently, economists have called JOLTS’s reliability into question because it’s a survey-based data source and survey response rates are declining.
What’s more, emerging data sources (like our own JobsIndex) offer real-time labor market data that includes far more employers than JOLTS does. But it’s not a simple matter of one data source being better than the other. In this post, we lay out how our data differs from BLS’s and how you can use each for your various labor market data needs.
All About JOLTS Data
JOLTS data is gathered through a monthly survey of 21,000 businesses that comprise a representative sample of the US labor market overall. Some businesses are surveyed via telephone and some complete a digital questionnaire.
In 2017, the survey response rate was about 64 percent, meaning about 13,440 businesses reported data. As of 2023, however, the response rate had fallen to below 31 percent, meaning about 6,510 businesses report data.
After collecting this data, BLS professionals process it and release it monthly, meaning that there is
