"The job market" is not one thing, and no single figure answers this question. What you can do is check five indicators in about fifteen minutes and reach a defensible view for your sector - which is the only version that affects you.
Indicator 1: Vacancies, and their direction
The most responsive signal available. The ONS publishes UK vacancy estimates monthly, broken down by industry; the US equivalent is JOLTS job openings.
What to look at: not the level, but the trend over the last six to twelve months, and specifically your own industry's series rather than the total. Vacancies typically turn before employment does, which makes them the best early indicator you have.
Indicator 2: The hires rate
Openings can exist without hiring. The hires rate - actual hires as a share of employment - tells you whether the openings are converting. A market with stable openings and a falling hires rate is one where employers are advertising but not committing, which is precisely what makes searching feel futile. See openings versus hires.
Indicator 3: The quits rate
How willing are people to leave voluntarily? Quits fall when workers do not believe they can find something better, and rise when they are confident. It is a good measure of worker confidence, and because most hiring is of people moving between jobs, low quits also means fewer vacancies opening up behind them.
Indicator 4: Redundancies and layoff announcements
The ONS publishes UK redundancy rates; layoff trackers and company announcements give a faster but noisier read. Watch for concentration - are cuts confined to a few sectors, or broadening?
Indicator 5: Duration of unemployment
The share of unemployed people out of work for six months or more. Rising duration with a flat unemployment rate means the same number of people are having a harder time - a genuinely worsening market that the headline rate hides completely.
How to read them together
- Vacancies up, hires up, quits up: improving, straightforwardly
- Vacancies flat, hires down, quits down: a freeze - employers cautious, workers staying put
- Vacancies down, redundancies up, duration up: genuinely deteriorating
- Vacancies up in your sector while the national picture worsens: ignore the national picture
That last case is common and important. Sector divergence is frequently larger than the aggregate movement.
The mistake to avoid
Drawing conclusions from a single month. These series are volatile and get revised. Look at six-month trends, and check whether the latest figure is outside the normal range of monthly variation before treating it as news - the same discipline you would apply to any business metric.
Do it for your own sector
Fifteen minutes with the ONS labour market bulletin, filtered to your industry, will tell you more about your prospects than a month of reading commentary. And knowing how to interrogate this kind of data is a workplace skill in itself - the Statistics for Business course at London School of Business UK teaches it. Enquire today.