Is Now a Good Time?

Next update expected: ~Feb 7

Giving job seekers the same market intelligence employers have. An experiment in AI-assisted pro-worker tooling.

The Score
~ / 100
What does this mean?
<40
Hiring freezes. Little leverage.
40–54
Slow going. Employers can afford to wait.
55–69
Opportunities if you look. Some room to negotiate.
70+
Opportunities find you. Real leverage to negotiate.
How has the market shifted?
Good Time to Move (70+)
Worth Exploring (55–69)
Build Your Position (40–54)
Get Creative (<40)

Historical composite score tracking labor market conditions for job seekers. Higher scores indicate better conditions for finding new employment.

Core The Core Metrics — How much leverage do workers have right now?

Quit Rate

Workers confident enough to leave voluntarily
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'15Now

Jobs per Job Seeker

Open positions ÷ unemployed workers
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'15Now

Hiring Rate

Actual hires happening, not just postings
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'15Now

Layoff Rate

Involuntary job losses
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'15Now
Context The Bigger Picture — Economic forces shaping the job market

Unemployment Rate

Share of workforce without jobs
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'15Now

Fed Interest Rate

Cost of borrowing that affects hiring budgets
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'15Now

Wage Growth

Year-over-year change in average pay
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'15Now

Workforce Participation

Share of 25-54 year olds working or looking
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'15Now
Where Things Could Go
The market has been frozen since mid-2024. Overall layoffs at 1.1% remain historically low — though tech and media have seen concentrated cuts that national data smooths over. Meanwhile, hiring has stalled. Quit rates stuck near 2.0%, more job seekers than openings for the first time since 2021. Fed cuts are underway but haven't thawed hiring. The score has drifted from the mid-50s to the upper 40s.
Four scenarios show the range of plausible futures — from continued stasis to genuine recovery. The most likely path is more of the same. Pick one to explore what it means, or build your own.
Understanding the Score

The score combines eight labor market indicators, weighted by how directly they measure worker leverage:

  • Core metrics (60% of score): Quit rate, job openings per unemployed worker, hiring rate, and layoff rate. These directly measure whether workers or employers have the upper hand.
  • Context metrics (40% of score): Unemployment rate, Fed interest rate, wage growth, and workforce participation. These shape the environment but are less direct.

The score also applies adjustments for unusual conditions: when the job openings ratio falls below 1.0 (more seekers than jobs), when the market is "frozen" (low hiring AND low quitting), and when Fed rates are near zero (historically stimulative).

The formula: Score = (0.6 × CoreAvg + 0.4 × ContextAvg) × 100 × adjustments

Each metric is normalized to 0–1 based on historical ranges (e.g., quit rate: 1.5% = 0, 3.0% = 1). Adjustments: ×0.92 if jobs/seeker < 1.0; up to ×0.88 for frozen market; ×1.08 if Fed rate < 0.5%.

View source code →

This is national data. Your industry, region, and role may differ significantly. Tech hiring can freeze while healthcare booms. San Francisco and rural Ohio are different markets.

The data lags reality. BLS releases come 4-6 weeks after the reference month. By the time you see it here, conditions may have shifted.

The thresholds are calibrated to recent history. A "bad" quit rate today might have been normal in 2010. The score tells you how now compares to 2015-2025, not to all of history.

There's no confidence interval. The score of "47" should really be read as "somewhere around 45-50" given measurement uncertainty and model choices.

All data comes from official government sources, retrieved via the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API:

Data updates automatically each month after BLS releases. The code is open source if you want to verify or adapt it.