ADP’s headquarters in Roseland, New Jersey, in June 2010. Photo: ADPDigital via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized.
Private employers continued adding jobs, but the pace slowed for a second week in ADP’s latest payroll reading, a sign that hiring was losing some momentum even as businesses kept expanding their workforces.
U.S. private employers added an average of 16,750 jobs a week in the four weeks ending October 10, ADP said Tuesday in its NER Pulse report. That was down from a revised average of 17,500 in the four weeks ending October 3 and 26,000 in the period ending September 26.
The distinction matters for people looking for work: employers were still adding positions overall, but at a slower rate. The figures do not show that private employment fell, and they do not establish how easy or difficult it was to find a job in any particular city or industry.
A slowdown, with an important revision
ADP previously reported an average weekly increase of 18,500 for the period ending October 3. Tuesday’s release lowered that estimate to 17,500. Comparing the new figure with the revised number gives a clearer picture of the latest change than comparing it only with last week’s headline.
The latest average was 750 jobs a week below the revised prior reading. It remained above the 8,250 average reported for the four weeks ending July 25, showing that the recent slowdown followed a broader pickup over the summer.
ADP cautioned that the estimates are preliminary and may change as more data arrives. The release did not provide an industry breakdown or wage-growth figures, so it cannot show which employers accounted for the change or whether workers’ pay was keeping up with their bills.
What the number does, and does not, measure
The NER Pulse is a seasonally adjusted estimate of weekly private-employment changes, presented as a rolling four-week average. It is not a count of 16,750 jobs created on one day, a monthly total, or an unemployment rate.
Each release overlaps with the preceding four-week window. That makes the figures useful for tracking the direction of hiring, but it also means consecutive readings are not independent blocks of job creation that can simply be added together.
The data arrives with a two-week lag to allow more complete estimates, ADP said. Tuesday’s release therefore describes the period ending October 10, not hiring conditions on October 27.
ADP Research produces the report with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. It is a private-payroll measure, separate from the federal government’s broader employment report. The next NER Pulse is scheduled for November 10; the weekly update is skipped in weeks when ADP publishes its monthly National Employment Report.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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