Kronos Inc. has announced the April release of the Kronos Retail Labor Index, a family of metrics and indices that analyze the relationship between the demand and supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector, and provide a distinct and early indicator of the overall state of the economy.
The April release includes data for March 2010. The report is available on the Kronos Retail Labor Index website.
According to the study:
- The Kronos Retail Labor Index: (This metric is defined as the percentage of job applications that result in a hiring, normalized within a scale of 0 to 100. A level of 3.00 percent means that for every 100 applications received, three hirings occurred). The Kronos Retail Labor Index increased to 4.17 percent this month, up 30.2 percent (on a relative basis) from 3.26 in March 2010.
- Retail Hiring Level: The 68 retailers representing 27,034 distributed locations across the U.S. that make up the Kronos data sample recorded 49,185 hirings (on a seasonally adjusted basis) in March 2010, an increase of 8.89 percent from the February 2010 seasonally adjusted figure of 44,113. This number was 26.63 percent higher than the 36,088 hirings recorded in March 2009.
- Retail Applications Level: The supply of applications decreased 16.37 percent to a seasonally adjusted level of 1,175,169 in March, an acceleration of the trend of declining application levels seen between January and February 2010. The March 2010 figure represented a 7.51 percent increase over the 1,263,376 applications processed in March 2009.
- Retail Employee Retention Rate: Employee retention continued to increase. Employees were 6.01 percent more likely to have a length of service of 60 days or more in March 2010 as compared to a year ago.
"The Kronos Retail Labor Index is up this month significantly from last month, good news for employees looking for a job in retail," said Dr. Robert Yerex, chief economist with Kronos. "In the next 18-24 months, we expect to see retail sales and hiring increase, though not to the levels they were at in 2008. We expect that a full 20 percent of the jobs lost in the recession are not likely to return."
