“The Employment Trends Index increased in every single month of 2014, capping the year off with strong growth, 2.3 percent, in the final quarter,” says Gad Levanon, managing director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. “The strengthening in the ETI suggests that rapid job growth is likely to continue throughout the first half of 2015. And as the labor market tightens further, acceleration in wage growth is soon to follow.”

December’s increase in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of the eight components. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get”; Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance; Industrial Production; Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now; Number of Temporary Employees; and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales.

The Employment Trends Index aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out “noise” to show underlying trends more clearly.

Source: The Conference Board