JobsIndex Data vs. BLS Data: What’s the Difference?

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 lag time built into JOLTS data. So what does this mean for the reliability of JOLTS? It depends on what you want to use it for.

As BLS explains in its reliability commentary, JOLTS data is subject to two types of error:

• Sampling error, meaning the sample doesn’t accurately represent the whole. Put differently, if the 6,510 businesses responding to the survey aren’t representative of US employers overall, the extrapolations made from the data those businesses report won’t accurately represent what’s happening in the wider US labor market.
• Non-sampling error, meaning a variety of things: some segment isn’t included in the sample, people don’t respond, people make mistakes in providing answers, the data is processed incorrectly, and so on. Again, the outcome from these types of errors is that the data gathered by the survey does not accurately represent the US labor market.

But JOLTS is designed specifically to provide a window into the US labor market, so it’s also subject to confidence testing to determine its validity for its intended purposes. What’s more, BLS also applies seasonal adjustments to its data to help illuminate whether data trends are the result of expected seasonal swings or of other underlying trends.

As a slightly delayed indicator of what’s going on in the US labor market as a whole, subject to the above JOLTS is considered a reliable source of data and is made publicly available for that purpose.

All About JobsIndex Data

JobsIndex data is gathered through web scrapes set up to gather information directly from employer websites and ATSes. Humans do not report the data; rather, the scrapes collect it digitally, which removes one potential point of human error. Once collected, the data goes through a rigorous quality control process that involves deduplication, daily scrape review and repair (as needed), removal of outliers, and formatting.

As of September 2024, JobsIndex includes data from 200,000 employers (including 135,000 employers in the US), and that number is always growing. Since January 2024, for example, we added 53,000 new employers to our JobsIndex database.

JobsIndex data is heavily stress tested because most of the jobs data comes from a service we provide to paying customers who advertise these jobs. In other words: our customers pay for accurate job scrapes, so we validate them every day and fix any scrapes that have broken on a daily basis. This ensures that the data powering JobsIndex is accurate and timely within the last 24 hours. We can also provide real-time data for certain use cases.

How to Use Each Data Source

If you’re interested in a macro view of the US labor market and you can tolerate a lag time of several weeks, JOLTS is still an accepted source. But if you’re interested in real-time data, data about specific employers, or data about wages and salaries associated with various industries and job titles, JobsIndex is the better data source. For example, jobs data on 135,000 US company sites on Sept 24, 2024 is available on September 25, 2024 – as compared to JOLTS data (extrapolated from 6,000 companies) which becomes available at the end of October, 2024.

Let’s look at some examples.

If you’re an investor interested in the hiring activity of specific large employers to drive investment decisions, JobsIndex is likely a better source of information because it can provide information on specific companies in real time. This information can be a leading indicator of company performance, as we saw when Amazon pulled thousands of job listings weeks before a down earnings report in 2022.

Consider this: there are 19,688 employers in the United States with 500 or more employees. JobsIndex tracks most of them (along with another 100,000+ employers). JOLTS only tracks a relatively small sample of large employers – and data users don’t know which ones.

Choose the Right Labor Market Data for Your Needs

If you need data that shows real-time or near-real-time labor market impacts (such as responses to news or fiscal policy) or data that’s specific to an industry, region, or employer, JobsIndex is likely the best choice for you. This is especially true if you have in-house data professionals who can perform analysis and accommodate for seasonal adjustments.

If you’re looking for more of a big-picture view of the US labor market, and you can wait a month or so, JOLTS is recognized as reliable.

And if you’re not sure whether your use case would benefit from JobsIndex data, feel free to get in touch. We’d love to talk you through your options and set you up with some free sample data to give you a sense of what you can do.