An otherwise forgettable BLS update on job openings in the US showed a big uptick in hiring on Tuesday.

Total vacancies across the world’s largest economy were 6.866 million on the last business day of March, the release said. That was down from February and marked a YTD low. Still, it managed to beat consensus.

That was an afterthought. The (old) news was the hires series, which printed 5.554 million, the highest in more than two years.

As the figure below shows, the MoM increase was the largest ever excluding the rebound from the original COVID layoffs.

The jump was attributable to transportation, warehousing and utilities, with a little help from professional and business services, bars and restaurants. “Naturally” given the political environment, federal government hiring fell.

The hiring rate, which in February was the lowest since 2020, jumped 0.4ppt, tied for the largest month-to-month increase in data back to 2000, again barring the COVID volatility.

The quit rate rose, as did layoffs. And the so-called “jobs-to-jobless” ratio watched closely by the Fed was 0.95, up four tenths from February.

Were it not for the (anomalous) jump in hiring, this would’ve been a mixed report. A new 2026 low for openings and an uptick in layoffs suggest waning appetite for adding workers.

But it’s pretty hard to ignore the hires leap which, taken at face value, suggests instead that March was defined by rekindled demand for labor — reflected, obviously, in the headline NFP print for that month.

As to which interpretation’s accurate, I honestly can’t say. The reliability of the JOLTS release post-pandemic is the subject of much debate. But who knows, maybe we’re breaking out of the “low-hire, low-fire” environment that’s characterized the US labor market for most of Donald Trump’s second term.

All of the above comes with the (not insignificant) geopolitical caveat that Tuesday’s JOLTS release doesn’t fully incorporate the impact from the war, which some worry might stymie the nascent recovery in hiring.