Online advertised vacancies increased 13,500 to 5,496,500 in January, according to The Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine Data Series, released today. The December Supply/Demand rate stands at 1.44 unemployed for each advertised vacancy with a total of 2.4 million more unemployed workers than the number of advertised vacancies. The number of unemployed was around 7.9 million in December.

"January showed a disappointing start for 2016," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "Labor demand levels remain very high but growth has continued to be slow since 2013."

In January, the Professional category saw large gains in Computer/Math (+29.0) and Healthcare (+24.2) with small gains in most other categories. The Services/Production category saw large losses in Sales (-20.5) and Food (-7.7) with a mixture of small gains/losses in the other categories.