{"id":5897,"date":"2012-02-07T15:31:16","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T20:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/?p=5897"},"modified":"2012-02-07T15:37:58","modified_gmt":"2012-02-07T20:37:58","slug":"tracing-the-great-recession-and-recovery-through-help-wanted-ads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/2012\/02\/07\/tracing-the-great-recession-and-recovery-through-help-wanted-ads\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracing The Great Recession And Recovery Through Help Wanted Ads"},"content":{"rendered":"
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kandyjaxx \/ Flickr<\/p>

Official jobs and unemployment numbers aren't the only way to trace the recession and the recovery<\/p><\/div>\n

After years of speculation on a “jobless recovery,” finally, things could be looking up<\/a>–at least for the moment.\u00a0 This week, the Bureau of Labor statistics reported<\/a> some serious gains on the national jobs front for January, with the creation of 243,000 jobs.<\/p>\n

While job counts and unemployment numbers are the most common ways to measure the national employment situation, they aren’t the only angle worth examining.\u00a0 The Conference Board<\/a>, a global business research firm, recently released a set of data<\/a> looking at online Help Wanted ads from May of 2005 to January of 2012.<\/p>\n

With the Conference Board data, we were able to chart the course of the Great Recession and the long march toward recovery.\u00a0 If you run your cursor over the each point on the chart below, you can see how many new Help Wanted ads posted online for each month, or how many total ads–old and new–were posted that month.<\/p>\n