One sign of better economic times is when more people start finding jobs. Another is when they feel confident enough to quit them. More people quit their jobs in the past three months than were laid off — a sharp reversal after 15 straight months in which layoffs exceeded voluntary departures.
The trend suggests the job market is finally thawing.
Some of the quitters are leaving for new jobs. Others have no firm offers. But their newfound confidence about landing work is itself evidence of more hiring and a strengthening economy.
“There is a century’s worth of evidence that bears out this view that quits rise and layoffs fall as the job market improves,” said Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago.
Still, the number of people quitting their jobs is nowhere near what it was before the recession. Economists expect the improvement in the job market to be fitful. In May, for example, private employers added 41,000 net jobs after adding 218,000 in April.
Yet the long-term trend points to an improving job market. The economy has created a net 982,000 jobs this year after a recession that wiped out more than 8 million.
The government says the number of people quitting rose in April to nearly 2 million. That was the most in more than a year and an increase of nearly 12 percent since January. That compares with 1.75 million people who were laid off in April, the fewest since January 2007, before the recession began.
Many clung to their jobs out of fear, said David Adams, vice president of training at Adecco, a national staffing agency. When Adecco tried to recruit workers to fill open positions, it frequently ran into the same obstacle: Few workers felt like betting on a new job that might soon disappear.
Not so much anymore. Adecco is seeing more employed workers seeking interviews, rather than laid- off workers searching for a lifeline.
“The hangover is kind of over,” Adams said. “It’s really starting to move toward a market where the employee can have a lot more confidence making a move.”
That’s why Katie Charland just quit her job at a parenting magazine in Phoenix to take a position with a nonprofit that supplies children’s educational programs.
Charland, 27, says the position is a dream job. Still, it carries a cost: She’s abandoning seniority at her old job. But she thinks the economy is expanding enough that her company will be able to attract state and corporate funding.
“I don’t see leaving my current job to pursue this as a risk,” Charland says. “I do feel like the economy is getting better and there’s more opportunity out there.”
Such optimism was rare in 2008 and 2009, when unemployment hit a 26-year high of 10.1 percent.
Studies have shown that worker morale fell during the recession but productivity rose as companies squeezed more work out of their employees. That points to a reason quits may keep rising.
“There is going to be a mass exodus of the top performers as the economy starts to turn around,” predicts Razor Suleman, a consultant who helps companies retain their best workers.
