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our big story of the day the December jobs report coming in hotter than expected with growth in government Healthcare and social assistance construction leading the way so how is this translating to employee sentiment well for that we want to bring in Daniel Xiao he's glasso lead Economist Daniel it's great to have you here on set with us let's talk about the numbers that we saw in this jobs report yes that headline number was strong but there was a little there were certainly some data points to be a bit concerned about Labor Force participation slipping just a bit how does this compare to what you're seeing on your platform well yes I do think that the jobs report is actually a little bit of a mixed bag under the hood we saw payroll growth was very strong but labor force participation came down a little bit employment from the household survey came down a little bit on the flip side we are seeing on our platform that employee sentiment is starting to pick up uh it's increased for the third straight month in December it's still down significantly compared to where it was a year ago but hopefully that gives us a little bit of optimism heading into the new year that employees are feeling a little bit more comfortable about their job security and the risks of a recession in the new year and I guess maybe just you know take a step back how do you guys kind of calculate that employee confidence and then maybe when you look as an economist at just kind of the the setup of the headline numbers from from the labor market how does that like what is that employee confidence indicating relative to kind of those more um mainstream data sets let's call them yes so employee confidence we we basically just ask employees like how confident they're feeling about the business outl for their employers over the next six months and then we we do some calculations we make differential good versus bad kind of yeah essentially right uh and so when we look at that data uh really what we want to get a sense of is like there's this business there these business confidence measures consumer confidence measures but how are employees feeling because they have a pretty good pulse on how uh businesses are actually doing uh and when we look at that data uh we think that it's it's it signals a few different things it signals how those businesses might be doing financially for example but it also might tie into other labor market indicators like the quits rate because if you're feeling particularly good about your employer well you might not want to quit and and conversely if you feel really good about the economy but not so good about your employer you might decide to to quit to look for a better opportunity Dan know what when we talk about who has the upper hand right now we talked for so long that it was the employees throughout the pandemic given the fact uh of the situation that we were in has that now reversed and I guess in terms of that's smaller head count that we've heard so many businesses uh Business Leaders talk about over the last several quarters when they talk about more Reliance on efficiency looking to streamline their business what impact then does that have to the employee well I don't think it's fully reversed I think that the labor market is still fairly hot but it's definitely more on a case-by casee basis now right so this isn't this isn't 2021 2022 where uh you could throw a stone and find a job opening right so for 20% right right so so for now it's it's a little bit more um uh you know job Seekers have to do a little bit more research to find those Industries or those parts of industries that are still hiring that are still looking for workers uh and you probably aren't getting quite the same raise that you would get uh just a few years ago but at the same time this is still a fairly strong labor market unemployment is still low there are still those opportunities out there it's just uh a little bit more selective I'm curious how you think about um you know again working at a firm like glass door and we see you know LinkedIn has an economist team indeed um how you think about the jolts report in the context of the work that you guys all do looking at your own platforms because there's uh it's it doesn't come up too often but every so often there's like well are we sure we know how many jobs are really open all this kind of stuff I'm just curious how you think through that the way the BLS adjusts it what you guys see on your platform and you know what that data set's been telling us about the labor market well the BLS does absolutely fantastic work like right they they are really the gold standard and understanding what's going on in the labor market and we like to think of ourselves as providing like supplementary data right like we can we can provide a view into maybe how employees are feeling or maybe that some of the things that they're talking about in their reviews that you can't really get from just like a plain uh plain old survey right uh and so we're hoping that that can provide a little bit of additional context to those BLS numbers but we're definitely not trying to replace them or anything Dan what are you seeing just from a skills shortage standpoint that was a story that we had talked about for so long kind of getting buried at this point back yeah but I bring this up though just because of the productivity issues or I should say concerns going into it with the development of AI exactly what impact that's going to have on the workforce is that further exacerbating maybe the shortage that we had going back a couple years uh I I think the skills shortage like narrative tends to be a little bit overblown in the sense that a lot of people underestimate how transferable their skills are and certainly as we're talking about uh you know kind of what skills are going to be important in the future I think soft skills are still going to be extremely important it's not just about you know having a stem degree nowadays uh those soft skills will still be important that person to person interaction you know I I don't think that AI is really going to fully replace uh so I think that those are skills that are applicable across Industries and even those hard skills too I think a lot of people say like oh Tech is going through this slowdown but those Tech skills are just as valuable in healthare or in finance or in other Industries where hiring might be a little bit more stable another win for the Arts we' love to see it love to see it on this program all right Daniel J uh Glass St lead Economist thanks so much for stopping by thanks