The Conference Board Employment Trends Index increased in April. The index now stands at 128.22, up from 127.15 (a downward revision) in March. The change represents a 5.8 percent gain in the ETI compared to a year ago.

"April's bounceback in the Employment Trends Index is somewhat reassuring, but expectations remain that job growth will be slower this year compared with last year," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "Given that the labor force is barely expanding, job growth of about 200,000 per month will be sufficient to continue rapidly lowering the unemployment rate."

April's increase in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven of the eight components. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Percentage of Firms with Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers, Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales, Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry, Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, Job Openings, and Industrial Production.

The Employment Trends Index aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.

The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index include:

• Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get" (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey) 
• Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor) 
• Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now ( National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation) 
• Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) 
• Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers (BLS) 
• Job Openings (BLS)** 
• Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board)* 
• Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)** 

*Statistical imputation for the recent month 
**Statistical imputation for two most recent months

The Conference Board publishes the Employment Trends Index monthly, at 10 a.m. ET on the Monday that follows each Friday release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report. The technical notes to this series are available on The Conference Board website: http://www.conference-board.org/data/eti.cfm.