CareerBuilder CEO: 19% Jobs Uptick, Better than BLS's 210k Consensus

CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson says his company sees 19 percent more jobs available today than last year. According to him, this is a great leading indicator to continuing strong unemployment reports from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ferguson told CNBC's Squawk Box this morning that Career Builder has seen a serious uptick in open job positions across the board. IT jobs, according to him, are up 18 percent year-over year. Finance is up 30 percent, sales 13%, customer service 30%, and manufacturing has been up 35% YoY. That said, Ferguson points to a significant problem getting in the way of those openings translating into increased employment right away, and which may actually account for the significant increase in availability of jobs. "The skills gap is getting worse each month, not better," he said, meaning that jobs stay open longer due to a lack of sufficiently skilled people to fill them." Ferguson notes that CareerBuilder is very close to job creation, and the statistics the company circulates tend to lead BLS's job report by three to four months typically. As such, he can confidently say that employment continues to get better. He told CNBC that the aggregated 19 percent uptick in job creation translates to better than the 21o thousand jobs expected for today's report. He believes that, as Greece's situation results in that can being kicked further down the road, it open the way for optimism regarding what is happening inside the US, which should reflect the labor market's ability to produce a consistent 300-thousand-plus report every month.