The standard chart: three national rates, monthly, seasonally adjusted. Useful for spotting recessions and the 2021–22 “Great Resignation” quits spike — but it’s an average across every industry and every state, which is where the rest of this piece goes.

Most JOLTS commentary shows openings and unemployment as two separate level lines. Dividing unemployed workers by openings collapses them into a single tightness reading: below 1.0 means there are more openings than unemployed workers to fill them (a “tight,” worker-favorable market); above 1.0 means more job seekers than openings (a “slack” market). The ratio peaked at 6.5 unemployed workers per opening in July 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis — far worse, and far more prolonged, than the shorter 2020 COVID spike. It then fell all the way to 0.5 (two openings per unemployed worker) at the height of the 2021–22 hiring boom, before drifting back up toward roughly 1:1 recently — a labor market with about as many openings as job seekers, not the acute worker shortage of a few years ago.

All 19 published industry groups, mutually exclusive (aggregates like “Total private” and “Government” are excluded so nothing is double-counted). Sorted by hires rate. The gray connector spans each industry’s low-to-high rate across the three measures — a short bar means the three rates cluster together; a long one means an industry has, say, high hiring but low separations (net growth) or the reverse.

State-level JOLTS runs about five months behind the national release, which is why this chart lags the others. The dashed line marks the December 2025 national average (2.0%). Quits track hiring ease more than layoffs do — workers quit more freely where jobs are easy to replace — so this is close to a map of where workers currently have the most leverage.