The Index That Predicts Hiring Just Flashed a Caution Sign
Sign Up For Daily Job Market News
The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index fell to 107.56 in September, down from an upwardly revised 108.08 in August, a drop of about 0.5% that ends 2 straight months of gains. The ETI combines 8 labor market signals into a single number built to forecast where payroll jobs are headed, so a move like this one is worth more attention than a single data point usually gets.
September split evenly: 4 signals got better, and 4 got worse. On the negative side, the share of consumers who say jobs are “hard to get” rose to 21.9% from 20.3%, temporary help employment fell by 10,900, and the share of part-time workers who want full-time work rose to 16.5% from 16.2%. The share of small businesses that can’t fill open positions fell 3 points to 32%, which sounds like good news for employers on its face, but for this index it signals cooling demand, not relief. On the positive side, initial unemployment claims fell and provided the biggest boost, job openings rose 129,000 to 7.21 million, industrial production rose 0.3%, and real manufacturing and trade sales rose 0.1%.
Look closely at which signals moved in which direction, and a pattern appears. Every negative signal touches hiring directly: more people struggling to find work, more workers stuck in part-time jobs they didn’t choose, fewer small employers short-staffed, and fewer temps on payrolls. Two of the 4 signals that improved (industrial production and manufacturing and trade sales) measure factories and output, not hiring itself.
Temp employment is the number I’d watch most closely here. Temporary and contract staffing is usually the first thing an employer adjusts when it gets cautious, because it’s the easiest lever to pull without touching permanent headcount. A drop of 10,900 is modest on its own, but it lines up with the same pullback I flagged after the September jobs report showed healthcare growing at half its usual pace and the broader labor market cooling at the edges first.
Even after the September dip, the index still sits 1.0% above where it was a year ago, which Conference Board economist Conrad Qi says “suggests moderate payroll employment growth ahead.” This is the right read for the economy overall. It doesn’t mean every employer or every job seeker experiences this market the same way this month.
If you’re hiring, the math here cuts in your favor at the margins: fewer small businesses are desperately short-staffed than they were a few months ago, which means a strong candidate you lost to a competing offer 6 months ago may be easier to land today. I’d move on candidates you want before year-end budget decisions slow things down further. If you’re job hunting, job openings went up in the same month more people said jobs are hard to get, so expect more competition for every role, not less.
Whichever side of this you’re on, a mixed signal like this one rewards acting early instead of waiting for clarity that may not come before the next release. If you need help moving quickly on a hire in a market this uneven, tell us about your hiring needs or explore our staffing services. And if you’re searching for your next role, see what’s open right now.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
Reach out and see how we can help.
Why Quiet Quitting Flipped Into ‘Loud Working’
If quiet quitting defined the last few years of workplace culture, Business Insider says the pendulum has swung hard the other way. Job-hopping has gotten harder, layoffs feel like a constant threat, and a growing number of workers have responded by getting louder, not quieter, about their work. The trend has a name now: loud working, making sure bosses and coworkers see your output and your wins, in hopes it leads to a promotion or keeps your name off the next layoff list.
Loud working takes 2 forms. Inside a company, it means talking up accomplishments and chasing the high-profile projects leadership notices. Outside the company, it means building a visible personal brand on LinkedIn, TikTok, and other platforms so recruiters can find you before you ever apply anywhere.
Monster career expert Vicki Salemi says the logic is simple: when leaving a job feels risky, people put more energy into proving their value right where they already are, speaking up about what they’ve accomplished instead of keeping their heads down and hoping the work speaks for itself.
Abhinav Bohra, an applied scientist at Amazon, offers the version of this I’d tell anyone to copy. Facing a list of 10 problems his team could tackle, he picked the 2 or 3 his manager cared about most and focused there. “Once you solve the critical problem, you automatically get visibility,” he says, and he credits that approach with multiple promotions.
It doesn’t always stay this clean. A former Meta employee laid off earlier this year described a scramble among coworkers to grab credit before cuts came. “It felt like the Hunger Games had started,” he said, recalling colleagues stretching thin presentations into long ones padded with filler just to look busier than they were. A current Big Tech employee described a colleague who shifted onto a project senior leaders would see, leaving her holding most of a far less visible one.
The external version of loud working is showing up in results, not just effort. Sarah Rilling, a chief of staff, posts about her field once or twice a day on LinkedIn. “Putting yourself out there does position you better because they see your skills without having to see your résumé,” she says, and recruiters and CHROs have reached out directly, leading to a new role partly because of that visibility.
Salemi’s warning matters as much as her advice: loud working backfires the moment it tips into taking credit for group work, dominating every meeting, or marketing your output instead of producing it.
Bohra’s approach is the one worth copying, and the padded-presentation version is the one that eventually gets noticed for the wrong reasons. Managers should read this story as a mirror, too. If your team is quietly competing over which projects leadership will see and dumping the rest on whoever’s left holding them, your review process is rewarding visibility over output, and the person finishing the unglamorous work may be the one you can least afford to lose.
