New-Hire Rate
New hires in a quarter relative to the county's stable employment.
How many people started a new job in a county in a quarter, relative to the size of its employment base.
The Census Bureau defines new hires as the "estimated number of workers who started a new job. More specifically, total hires that, while they worked for an employer in the specified quarter, were not employed by that employer in any of the previous four quarters" (QWI 101). The exclusion matters: workers returning to an employer they had worked for within the past year are counted in the Bureau's broader hires measure but not in this one, so seasonal recalls and rehires after a layoff do not inflate it. What remains is closer to genuinely new employment relationships.
The base for the rate is full-quarter employment, which the Bureau defines as an "estimate of stable jobs, i.e., the number of jobs that are held on both the first and last day of the quarter with the same employer." Expressing hires against that base makes counties of very different sizes comparable.
Hiring and job growth are not the same thing. A county can hire heavily while employment is flat, if departures run at a similar pace, so this measure describes the flow of people into work rather than the net change in the number of jobs.
Metrics in this family#
New-hire rate
levelNew hires in the most recent available quarter as a share of stable employment in that quarter.
Considerations#
The series is not seasonally adjusted. Hiring is strongly seasonal in some industries, and because this is a single quarter rather than a full year, the figure carries that seasonal pattern.
This is a county measure. Every tract in a county shows the same figure, and hiring is not spread evenly within a county. See how we combine geographies.
Coverage follows jobs covered by state unemployment insurance. The Bureau notes that "Federal employment has not been integrated into the regular releases of the QWI" and that uncovered work includes "some agricultural jobs, railroad employment, self-employment, and other exceptions that vary from state to state." Hires are attributed to the county where the job is located, not where the worker lives.
Measures that require employment across a whole quarter are published later than the rest, so this figure sits a quarter or more behind the Bureau's most recent release. Each release also revises earlier quarters.
Published cells carry statistical noise for disclosure protection, and cells that fail publication standards are withheld rather than reported as zero. Small counties lose cells more often. Counties whose reporting has fallen well behind the rest of the country show no value.
References#
- 1QWI 101https://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/QWI_101.pdf