Getting A Job Is Getting Harder With Layoffs And Fake Listings

Forbes

5 days ago

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Jobs market data of late, which should describe the reality of businesses and workers, seems misleading. Not intentionally, but through the mechanisms of trailing data and the need to dig to find early signs of what might be happening.
A Data Recap
The monthly job numbers for June were not as comforting as they seemed on the surface. Although above expectations, that didn't tell the full story. The number of long-term unemployed, who have been jobless for at least 27 weeks), grew by 190,000 to 1.6 million. They were 23.3% of all unemployed people.
Government employment was up by 73,000 in June, with state government employment up by 47,000 (40,000 of that being in education). Healthcare employment was up by 39,000 in June. Other major industries — mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction; construction; manufacturing; wholesale trade; retail trade; transportation and warehousing; information; financial activities; professional and business services; leisure and hospitality; and other services — were flat.
As ManpowerGroup President and Chief Strategy Officer Becky Frankiewicz wrote at the time, 'The top-line numbers look positive, but our real-time data reveals underlying shifts. June marked the weakest hiring month of the year, with new postings down 7% month-over-month and 2% year-over-year. Open postings fell 8% from May.'
What Else Is Happening
To try and better understand some of the larger dynamics in labor markets, here are data about new jobs and job openings in a single graph using data available from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Announced job openings and actual hires.
New jobs shows the number of jobs added every month by taking the total number of employed persons in that month and subtracting the employed persons in the previous month. These are jobs where someone has been hired. If the number is negative, there are fewer jobs than in the previous month; if the number is positive, there are more jobs.
New job openings are the number of job openings that companies say they have. These are supposedly open positions for which companies say they want to hire. The treatment is the same as with added jobs, by subtracting from a month's number the number from the previous month. Again, it can be negative if fewer or positive if more.
To make the graph easier to understand and see, it starts right after the big pandemic swings in 2020. The number of lost jobs in April 2020 was 20,471,000, which makes everything else virtually impossible to see because of the relative scales.
The number of jobs added is significantly higher than the number of new job openings. Looking at the averages for each in 2025, there were 127 jobs added each month but only 52 job openings were announced. This suggests that while there is still hiring in some areas, corporate projections of new jobs have dropped.
Positions Getting Slashed
Many companies are slashing positions. According to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks tech and federal layoffs, tech 163 companies discharged 80,103 employees so far in 2025. In government, DOGE laid off 67,749 employees and there was a total 178,296 total federal departures.
There are serious shifts going on in employment. Many job advertisements are reportedly fake and one study of 1,641 hiring managers found 40% of respondents admitted to posting fake job notices. The practice isn't new, but it has jumped in popularity to create an impression to competitors and shareholders.
How many of the new job openings have been fake? To what degree are government statistics being manipulated by corporate trolls? Job seekers, corporate strategists, investors, and even the Federal Reserve have their work cut out for them when trying to grasp what the labor market is doing.