The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) increased in May. The index now stands at 118.58, up from 117.32 (a downward revision) in April. This represents a 5.4 percent gain in the ETI compared to a year ago.

“The Employment Trends Index continues to signal solid job growth with an improvement in each of its eight components in the first five months of 2014,” said Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. “The need for employers to rapidly expand their payroll in light of strengthening economic activity is a major factor in the rapid decline in the unemployment rate.”

May’s increase in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven of its eight components. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Industrial Production, Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales, Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers, Number of Temporary Employees, Job Openings, and Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get.”

The Employment Trends Index aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out “noise” to show underlying trends more clearly.

The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index include:

• Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get” (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey®)
• Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor)
• Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (© National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation)
• Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers (BLS)
• Job Openings (BLS)**
• Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board)*
• Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)**

The Conference Board publishes the Employment Trends Index monthly, at 10 a.m. ET on the Monday that follows each Friday release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report. The technical notes to this series are available on The Conference Board website:
www.conference-board.org/data/eti.cfm.