Finance now has 3 open seats for every hire

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its August JOLTS report on September 29. I went straight to the finance and insurance line.

353,000 job openings. 110,000 hires. That's 3.2 open seats for every person hired in the sector. A year earlier it was 1.8, on 242,000 openings and 137,000 hires.

What the 3 lines say

Openings are up about 46 percent in a year. Hires are down about 20 percent. Employers in the sector posted a lot more seats and filled fewer of them.

The quits line helps explain it. 65,000 people in finance and insurance quit in August, against 82,000 a year ago, and the quits rate sat at 1.0 percent. A quit is someone leaving voluntarily, which makes it the closest thing in the data to a person deciding to go find something better. Fewer of them are making that call.

People who have a good seat here are mostly keeping it.

What it looks like from inside a bank

Take the req that went up in June. It's still up. HR has a stack of resumes, and the 3 or 4 market managers you'd hire tomorrow aren't in it.

Those people have a book, a team and a decent year behind them. They aren't browsing job boards, so the posting never reaches them. With quits this low, I think a lot of them won't apply this fall.

That's my read. The BLS doesn't measure it. The data shows seats piling up and people staying put, and I'm connecting the two from 25 years of watching how producers actually move.

What I'd do with it

Write down the 10 people in your market you'd hire tomorrow. Then work out what it would take for each of them to return your call.

Some will talk because of who's asking. Others need to see the seat first. A few will say no, and even that tells you something about how your bank looks from outside.

What this data doesn't say

A few limits, stated plainly, so this doesn't get quoted further than it goes.

It's national and it covers the whole sector. Finance and insurance includes insurers and securities firms along with banks. I can't tell you how many of the 353,000 seats are at California community banks.

August is preliminary. Openings jumped 49,000 from July in a single month, from 304,000 to 353,000, and a move that size is the kind I'd want to see hold up in the next report before leaning on it.

A JOLTS opening is a position with active recruiting underway. A high count can mean strong demand, slow hiring, or both, and the report can't separate them.

And a low quits rate means few people are leaving. It can't tell you whether they'd listen to a call.

What I'd watch next

The September JOLTS report will show whether 353,000 holds or gets revised down. If the ratio stays near 3 and quits stay near 1.0 percent, I'd expect the same pattern in California banking through year end. That's a forecast from my own calls, not from the BLS.

If you're hiring for a production or credit seat in California, let's talk.

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