Job postings on Indeed, seasonally adjusted and indexed to February 1, 2020 = 100, in aggregate and by sector. Vacancies are the most direct read on labor demand — this index updates in near-real-time, more than a month ahead of JOLTS, making it the high-frequency window onto Beveridge-curve dynamics.
This view presents the seasonally adjusted Indeed job postings index for the U.S., including overall and sector-specific indices from the Indeed Hiring Lab Job Postings Tracker.
Why it matters: The theoretical core of the post-2022 soft-landing case was the Waller–Figura conjecture: with the economy on the steep section of the Beveridge curve, labor demand could cool down the vacancy side — "vacancies fall, unemployment doesn't rise" — which Blanchard, Domash and Summers explicitly doubted, citing the curve's historical tendency to shift outward. This is the fastest data for tracking which side of that debate the economy is on. The entire round trip of the vacancy-to-unemployed ratio (V/U) from over 2 back toward 1 showed up here more than a month before each JOLTS confirmation. The sector detail has its own use: which industries freeze hiring first, and which are still competing for workers, is a bottom-up shortcut to locating the cycle. Caveat: the index measures postings on Indeed, so long-run drift in platform share pollutes multi-year level comparisons — treat it as a high-frequency cyclical indicator, not a decade-scale structural one.