A recent working paper by Anton Cheremukhin and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarr?a suggests a simpler answer: Not all job vacancies are created equal.2 Firms post openings for different reasons. Some firms are trying to hire people who are unemployed. Other firms are trying to poach workers who already have jobs.
These two types of job vacancies have very different implications for the labor market:
- Vacancies aimed at unemployed workers create new employment opportunities and affect the unemployment rate.
- Poaching vacancies mostly reshuffle workers across firms without changing total employment.
If we lump these two types of vacancies together―as the official vacancy data do―changes in aggregate vacancies may not tell us much about labor market slack.