Inside the ADP Report - How many jobs we added in March & what it says about our economy:
Bottom Line: The March private sector jobs report from ADP showed yet another month of stronger jobs growth. With 263,000 private sector jobs being added last month (exceeding economist estimates by more than 90,000 jobs) - the financial markets responded positively. What's more is that when you look under the hood of the report the news is even more impressive than the number.
For years you've heard me say that the missing ingredient keeping the labor market from really breaking out of mediocre growth, has been the lack of participation from smaller businesses. In typical, healthy, economic conditions - small businesses lead in job creation. Small businesses are the best indicator of current economic conditions as smaller companies generally only hire when there's an economic need to do so. With that as the backdrop here are the job increases by company size:
- Small businesses: +118,000 jobs
- Mid-size businesses: +100,000
- Large businesses: +45,000
That breadth takes a solid jobs report and makes it a potentially outstanding one. The only fly in the ointment was a negative revision to the prior month's job growth of 54,000 jobs. That being said the last time we added 263,000 private sector jobs in March was 2006. So for the second consecutive month we've had the been private sector job gains in 11 years!
It's clear that we continued to see upward economic momentum in March. This should bode well for other economic indicators that we'll be receiving over the next week & should allow us to see much better 1st quarter economic growth over what we've experienced in the last several years.