Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey News Release — 2011-12-13

There were 3.3 million job openings on the last business day of October, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The hires rate (3.1 percent) and separations rate (3.0 percent) were little changed over the month. The job openings rate has trended upward since the end of the recession in June 2009. (Recession dates are determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research.) This release includes estimates of the number and rate of job openings, hires, and separations for the nonfarm sector by industry and by geographic region. The number of job openings in October was 3.3 million, essentially unchanged from 3.4 million in September. (See table 1.) Although the number of job openings remained below the 4.4 million openings when the recession began in December 2007, the level in October was 1.2 million higher than in July 2009 (the most recent trough for the series).