If you were looking for a job in November, you may have found a lot of job openings, but actually getting hired was another matter.

Employers brought 363,000 fewer people on board than they did in October, bringing the hiring rate down to 3.5% from 3.7% in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday. That was its lowest since 2014 other than the pandemic lockdown months in early 2020.

The number of job openings also fell slightly to 8.8 million in November from 8.9 million in October. That meant there were 1.4 job openings available for every unemployed person, well above the historical average, although below the 2-1 ratio at the peak of the hot labor market in March 2022. The numbers were in line with the expectations of forecasters surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal.

Still, the steady number of job openings highlighted how resilient the labor market has stayed over the last year, to the 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:surprise of many economists who have been expecting mass layoffs. The Federal Reserve’s 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:🥀campaign of an🎃ti-inflation interest rate hikes has made it꧟ costlier for companies and individuals to borrow mon༺ey, but people have kept spending, and businesses have kept paychecks coming through the financial headwinds. 

If those long-expected layoffs are ever coming, there was no sign of them in November’s data despite the hiring slowdown. The layoff rate stayed at the historic low rate of 1%.

There was less quitting too, with 3.5 million people leaving their jobs voluntarily, down by 157,000 from October, suggesting worker🔥s are less confident of finding be𒊎tter options than the jobs they have. 

The slowly cooling job market should reduce upward pressure on wages, further pushing down inflation, Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, said in a commentary. That could give policymakers at the Fed breathing room to ease up on squeezing the economy with high interest rates and could prompt them to cut the key fed funds rate down from its current 22-year high as early as May.