Vacancies! Apply within.

There were 7.618 million job vacancies across the US economy on the last business day of April, the BLS said Tuesday.

The blockbuster JOLTS headline beat every estimate and topped consensus by 750,000. The print counts as the highest since May of 2024.

As the figure shows, the month-to-month increase in overall job vacancies was the largest since April of 2021. It was also the third-largest of the post-pandemic era and the fourth-largest in the history of the series, which dates to 2000.

A surface-level assessment says a sudden increase in demand for labor’s indicative of an upturn in underlying demand for goods and services, which is to say Tuesday’s release — “stale” as every JOLTS report might be — bodes well for the economy.

But I’m skeptical of these figures. For one thing, hires fell sharply and broadly, erasing around two-thirds of the prior month’s big increase.

In addition, the vast majority of the headline openings gain was concentrated in professional and business services, where a 668,000 advance was the largest ever, and by a country mile.

It’s hard to square that with the notion that agentic AI’s taking jobs from humans. Then again, you could almost as easily argue the surge is due to AI (i.e., companies hiring for specialized work as the arms race intensifies), which speaks to the futility in over-analyzing an anomalous datapoint.

Also worth a mention: Openings for businesses with fewer than 10 employees more than doubled, rising 133% from March to April.

From the Fed’s perspective, the most relevant takeaway was the openings-to-unemployed ratio.

As the figure above shows, the so-called jobs-to-jobless ratio was 1.033 in April — so, more than one open job for every American counted as officially unemployed.

If you’re Kevin Warsh and you want to cut rates, that doesn’t help. At all. It underscores the notion that downside risks to the labor market continue to abate. And in case you haven’t noticed, upside risks to inflation have only grown.

This marks the first time vacancies outnumbered unemployed job searchers since June. Layoffs, meanwhile, fell the most since November and the second-most in over a year.