US job openings rose more than expected and quits increased in the second of several key macro updates scheduled for release this week.

The BLS’s JOLTS report counted 7.744 million openings on the last business day of October, more than the 7.52 million consensus expected.

The prior month’s headline print was revised lower. The gain from September to October, at 372,000, was the largest since August of 2023.

Hires slipped to 5.313 million, the lowest in five months and the second-fewest of the post-pandemic era.

At this point in the cycle (not that anyone actually knows where we are in the cycle, present company included), it’s fair to suggest the JOLTS release doesn’t pack anything like the market-moving punch it had during the most acute phase of the Fed’s fight to restore inflation to more tolerable levels.

There was a time when this update was arguably just as important as the monthly jobs report. Not so much these days, but it still garners more attention than it would’ve prior to the public health crisis.

Plugging in Tuesday’s headline, the openings-to-unemployed ratio moved up to 1.1088, technically the highest since June.

It’s the same story there: The Fed probably can’t get any more blood from that particular stone when it comes to disinflation. That ratio’s basically normalized now, and it’ll probably loiter at or around 1:1 as long as the economy holds up.

On the quits front, there was bad news — or suboptimal news, let’s call it. Quits rose 228,000 to 3.326 million. It was the largest monthly increase since May of 2023.

The quit rate rose to 2.1%, marking the first increase in 17 months.

With the caveat that this data covers October, a month of weather-related distortions, Tuesday’s release appeared to suggest the US labor market’s still a bit unbalanced. There are a lot of openings and although the quits metrics have erased their pandemic-era spike, the gap between pay growth for so-called “job switchers” versus those who remain in their current position may still be contributing to some underlying churn.

And yet, with the hires measure subdued, the most accurate way to characterize the situation is probably just to say businesses are hoarding labor more than they are actively seeking to grow payrolls.

As Wall Street Journal “Fed whisperer” Nick Timiraos put it, “the slow-to-hire, slow-to-fire labor market continues.”