For the 5th straight month, job openings posted online dropped in July according to the Conference Board. The number of online postings (3.86 million vacancies) was 5.4% below July of last year. I am not sure how the Conference Board generates and measures the data, but I have to imagine that it is imperfect at best. Given how many duplicate postings there are on job boards, combined with the propensity for the major boards to never take down old ads as well as the number of online scam ads (see related post here), I have to imagine that the numbers are somewhat suspect. (That will be a good blog post for another day).

A far more reliable report will be issued tomorrow by LinkUp which shows the number of job openings that companies post directly to their own corporate web sites. The LinkUp data contains no duplicate postings, no scam ads, and no old jobs. Granted, the data is generated from only 9,000 or so companies throughout the U.S., but it’s still far more reliable than most other jobs data available today. Look for the report here tomorrow morning.