What does a normalizing job market look like?

There were just over eight million job openings at the end of June. That’s eight million roles awaiting a new hire, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its most recent JOLTS report.

The keywords for June, according to BLS, were “unchanged” and “little changed” from the month before. The number of job openings? Unchanged. The number of people who lost their jobs or quit their jobs or got hired? All pretty much the same.

But if you zoom out a little further, there has been a clear decline in all of the above over the last year. This is basically the job market normalizing after the roller coaster of the last few years.

The unemployment rate is low and “the job market is relatively healthy overall,” said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor.

But, he said it doesn’t really feel that way to a lot of workers. With good reason.

“We’re seeing that employers are not really hiring at the levels that we’ve seen in the past, and as a result, employees are sitting tight, too,” he said.

Mostly, because they aren’t seeing many opportunities.

“As a result, employees who are currently employed might be in a situation where they’re thankful for that job security, but there are also a lot of workers who might feel stuck,” Zhao said.

And a lot of people who are trying to get into the job market are having trouble because there’s so little turnover.

Ron Hetrick, senior economist at the labor market analytics company Lightcast, said all of that contributes to the perception that the economy isn’t doing so well.

“But the reality is, layoffs are incredibly low,” he said.

Which is always a good sign. 

Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, said workers might prefer a super hot job market where they apply for a job, get hired immediately and get a big increase in pay. But, he said, “the job market we have right now is actually better, in many ways, at least for the economy overall.”

“We can remember when we had the great reopening of the economy that supply and demand of workers was wildly out of balance,” he said.

Lots of people were quitting their jobs — often for new ones — with big pay raises. Meanwhile, businesses were struggling to hire and raising wages to compete.

“And what was happening during that time? You’d go to a hotel and they weren’t capable of serving breakfast, for example. A factory was not capable of producing the things that it needed to produce,” Hamrick said.

Now, he said, businesses have a better shot at finding the workers they need. And the job market is in better balance.