HR pros are missing a key source for labor market decisions absent October’s jobs report

The website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) went quiet this week, and the morning of Oct. 3 came and went without the September jobs report that was slated to be released.

The report was delayed for the first time since 2013 due to the shutdown that occurred on Oct. 1, after Republicans and Democrats reached an impasse over a bill to keep the government funded. This means HR professionals who typically rely on this report to make hiring decisions are flying partially blindfolded for the foreseeable future.

Employers are operating without BLS insights at a moment when many companies typically look to make decisions about their hiring strategy, said Trent Cotton, head of talent acquisition insights and analyst relations for recruitment platform iCIMS.

“October is usually when people start planning budgets, and it’s workforce planning season, and so not to have that data could be crippling,” he said. At the same time, TA professionals may not be so acutely impacted, given they tend to rely on more granular data to make hiring decisions in the short-term, sources told HR Brew.

How gaps in data will affect employers. The data HR pros typically rely on is akin to a three-legged stool, incorporating the BLS, their own internal tracking, as well as external sources, Cotton said. They might look at this data to get a sense of how their time-to-fill for certain roles compares to other employers in their sector, or what job skills or titles are trending.

While the balance of this stool is currently off-balance due to the lack of government data, Cotton said he didn’t expect this data gap to affect TA teams as much as it might affect other leaders who tend to rely on the BLS reports.

Recruiters tend to focus on microeconomic trends, whereas CEOs are more likely to pay attention to broader microeconomic trends, said Cole Napper, VP of research, innovation, and talent insights for labor market intelligence platform Lightcast.

“Recruiters know that they need real-time data, because the market shifts very quickly,” he said. Individual recruiters’ data needs when hiring for roles on a day-to-day basis are likely to look different than those of a CEO who is weighing whether to open a new location, for example, or add or cut large numbers of workers. That being said, Lightcast advocates for a “both, and” approach, recommending employers incorporate the firm’s own insights about job postings and candidate profiles with government data.

“No single data set answers every labor market question,” he added.

What other reports say about the labor market. HR pros seeking to figure out what went on with the labor market in September might look to sources like ADP or Indeed for answers.

These reports provide evidence that the “low hire, low fire” trend continued last month. Private-sector employment declined by 32,000 jobs in September, according to ADP, suggesting that “US employers have been cautious with hiring,” said Nela Richardson, the firm’s chief economist.

Meanwhile, Indeed’s job postings index showed that overall job postings on the platform were down 2.5% from the previous month as of Sept. 26. “Indeed data also reflects a broad-based slowdown in hiring across sectors,” senior economist Cory Stahle said in an emailed statement to HR Brew, as only banking and finance showed an uptick in job postings year over year.

Employers appeared to hold onto workers, as the unemployment rate remained at 4.3%, the same level as August, according to the Chicago Fed.

Such reports paint a partial picture of the economy, but for as long as BLS reports are delayed, “it’s gonna create uncertainty,” said Andrea Derler, head of research with workplace analytics firm Visier.

Derler said she hoped this moment would lead to “renewed discussions around the importance of data and that we cannot be without it anymore, that we cannot make decisions without any data.”