The JOLTS series had always been a seemingly superfluous set of labor numbers for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The agency wanted to go deeper into employment when it originally presented these other series in 2002. The unemployment rate seemed accurate enough, but it came at the labor market solely from the view of labor supply. As the BLS said of its new set of figures in their initial publication: The number of unfilled jobs—used to calculate the job openings rate—is an important measure of the unmet demand for labor. With that statistic, it is possible to paint a more complete picture of the U.S. labor ... (full story)