For several years, jobseekers and workforce professionals have confronted an apparent contradiction. Employers report millions of job openings, yet many qualified applicants struggle to receive an interview, much less a job offer.
One common explanation is that the number of openings is exaggerated by duplicate job advertisements, remote positions listed in several locations, or vacancies that employers have no intention of filling. New research from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics challenges that explanation—at least as it applies to the government’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, commonly known as JOLTS.
JOLTS Does Not Count Online Job Advertisements
JOLTS is sometimes confused with data collected from online job boards. It does not count advertisements from LinkedIn, Indeed, or other employment sites. Instead, BLS surveys employers directly.
For a position to qualify as a job opening under JOLTS, three conditions must be met: a specific position and work must be available, the job must be capable of starting within 30 days, and the employer must be actively recruiting candidates from outside the establishment.
This distinction is important. One position advertised on several websites might appear multiple times in online-posting data, but that does not automatically become multiple openings in JOLTS.
BLS Tested the Overcounting Theory
BLS researchers specifically investigated whether employers—particularly businesses with multiple locations—were reporting the same vacancy more than once.
They found very little evidence that this was occurring on a scale large enough to distort the national numbers. Only 0.08 percent of the reports examined were classified as likely overcounts.
The researchers then applied an intentionally conservative test. They treated every potentially questionable case as an actual overcount and recalculated the job-openings rate without those reports. The result was virtually unchanged.
BLS also compared single-location businesses with multi-location businesses. If employers were routinely assigning the same opening to several locations, the number of openings reported by multi-location businesses should have risen much faster. Instead, the two groups followed similar patterns.
The evidence indicates that the extraordinary increase in job openings during and following the pandemic reflected genuine changes in the labor market—not widespread duplicate reporting.
The More Important Question
These findings do not mean every job advertisement encountered by a jobseeker represents a genuine or immediately fillable opportunity. Online postings and JOLTS measure different things. Employers may leave advertisements online, post positions on multiple platforms, change their hiring plans, or recruit continuously for positions with high turnover.
BLS also acknowledges an important limitation: response rates to JOLTS have declined. If the employers responding to the survey differ systematically from those that do not, some bias could remain. Further research is needed.
Nevertheless, the BLS findings suggest that we should not explain away the disconnect between job openings and jobseeker experiences simply by assuming that the openings are fictitious or duplicated.
Instead, workforce professionals should ask a more useful question:
If the openings are largely real, what prevents them from becoming hires?
The answer may involve mismatches in location, skills, wages, schedules, experience requirements, or working conditions. It may also involve unnecessarily complicated applications, automated screening systems, slow employer decision-making, unrealistic job descriptions, or candidates who cannot effectively demonstrate what they can do.
A reported vacancy is only the beginning of a hiring process. It does not tell us whether employers can find the people they want, whether qualified candidates can make it through the selection system, or whether the job is attractive enough for someone to accept.
For workforce professionals, that is the practical value of this research. The central problem may not be that the openings do not exist. It may be that too many genuine opportunities are lost somewhere between the employer’s need and the jobseeker’s ability to reach it.
The next challenge is to identify precisely where that conversion breaks down—and what workforce organizations can do to improve it.