Story Highlights
- Job Creation Index at +32 in August
- Fourth month at record high
- Forty-four percent of workers say employer is hiring
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Gallup's U.S. Job Creation Index registered +32 for the fourth consecutive month in August. This remains the highest score Gallup has recorded since it began to measure employees' perceptions of job creation at their workplaces in early 2008.
Gallup began tracking job creation just after the U.S. economy entered the Great Recession. The Job Creation Index tumbled during the 2008 financial crisis, hitting a record low of -5 in early 2009. This means more workers reported that their company was reducing the size of its workforce by letting workers go than said it was expanding its workforce by hiring more workers. Gradually, the index climbed up from that low point, and hit a then-record high of +30 in September 2014. The index then hovered between +27 and +29 until it increased again in April of this year. It has remained at its record high of +32 since May.
The August index is based on interviews with more than 17,500 full- and part-time U.S. workers, conducted Aug. 1-31 through Gallup Daily tracking. Gallup asks workers nationwide each day whether their employer is increasing, reducing or maintaining the size of its workforce. In August, 44% of employed Americans reported that their employer was hiring, while 12% reported that their employer was letting people go. Thirty-nine percent of workers said their employer was not changing the size of its workforce.
Regional job creation in August was consistent with what Gallup has found for most of the summer, with job creation highest in the Midwest and lowest in the East. And net hiring in the nongovernment sector remains slightly higher than in the government sector.
Bottom Line
Gallup's Job Creation Index is holding steady at a record high, a positive sign that hiring activity in the U.S. is strong and better than at any point in the last seven years. The index's stability also could indicate that international events that caused recent volatility in the U.S. stock market and likely caused Americans' economic confidence to erode have not had a noticeable effect on the U.S. job market to date.
These data are available in Gallup Analytics.
Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Aug. 1-31, 2015, on the Gallup U.S. Daily survey, with a random sample of 17,569 adults, aged 18 and older, who are employed full or part time, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cellphone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
Learn more about how Gallup Daily tracking works.
