CB Employment Trends Index

The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI) is a monthly leading composite combining 8 indicators to anticipate US total nonfarm payroll employment. Payroll employment is the target measured by the BLS Current Employment Statistics payroll survey, and the composite is not a single survey. The series runs from November 1973, and the index launched on June 9, 2008.

It is published by The Conference Board, a US nonprofit think tank founded in 1916. Aggregating its inputs filters out noise to show underlying trends. It leads employment by two months, and the correlation between six-month growth rates is 0.85. It is not the monthly jobs count, the unemployment rate, or current employment, and it does not replace the BLS Employment Situation report.

The index appears monthly at 10 a.m. ET on the Monday after the Friday BLS Employment Situation report. It shifts to Tuesday after a Monday holiday and covers a single reference month.

Each release shows the headline level, the revised prior level, the year-ago change, ranked contributions, an economist quote, and the eight-component list. The prior month is routinely revised, and late inputs are filled by statistical imputation, then replaced with actuals. Each January brings benchmark revisions to standardization factors, and values after the methodology change of November 9, 2020 do not compare directly with earlier values. Methodology and technical notes accompany the release.

The index blends 8 indicators spanning worker views, hiring demand, staffing flows, slack, and output.

• Perceived job availability: the share of consumers saying jobs are hard to get, which often moves before employment peaks.
• New jobless claims: weekly initial unemployment insurance claims, a noisy early signal with many false moves.
• Open hiring demand: unfilled posts at small firms plus openings from JOLTS, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
• Temporary help jobs: temp payrolls, since firms cut temps early in weakness and add temps early in recovery.
• Part time slack: involuntary part time workers as a share of all part time, rising when firms trim hours before jobs.
• Output and sales: industrial production and real manufacturing and trade sales, since firms adjust hours before headcount.

The release for reference month February 2020 came at 10 a.m. ET on Monday, March 9, 2020. The index stood at 108.96, down from a revised 109.85, and down 1.3 percent from a year ago. Five of the 8 components contributed negatively, led by a large drag from perceived job availability, while the other 7 were slightly positive together.

The publisher said not to read the drop as labor market weakness before the COVID-19 outbreak, a case against overreading a noisy month. The lesson is that a one-component move does not speak alone and must be weighed with the rest.

1. Assemble inputs: collect the 8 series for the reference month, seasonally adjusted, with late values filled by statistical imputation.
2. Symmetric change: compute each component's symmetric monthly change, a formula that returns to start after an equal rise and fall.
3. Volatility adjustment: multiply each change by a standardization factor based on its past volatility, so calm and jumpy series carry equal weight.
4. Sum and update: add the 8 adjusted changes using the same method as the Leading Economic Index, then compound the prior level by that total.

For illustration only, not real data, 0.259 on 108.00 gives about 108.28.

1. Trend adjust and rebase: align long run index growth with employment growth, then scale the series to 2016=100 for display only.