On the first Friday of every month, the country's financial elite wake up early and breathlessly await the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly Employment Situation Summary-or, as you probably know it, the jobs report.
"It's the best single collection of data that we get that tells us about what's happening in the job market," bankrate.com Washington bureau chief Mark Hamrick said.
The report seems simple, but if you want to fully understand what its numbers mean for the economy, you're going to need some context. Here's what to keep in mind as you scan it.
The unemployment rate usually gets the most press every month after the jobs report is released, but that number doesn't account for every jobless person. The BLS defines "unemployed" as a jobless person who is actively searching for employment. When the October jobs report noted that unemployment is down to 5.8 percent, that was a good sign-but it doesn't quite paint a full picture.
First off, the national number won't necessarily reflect the situation where you live.
"Our economy is incredibly complex and made up of a lot of different small or large economies that are distinct from each other," said Josh Wright of Economic Modeling Specialists International. "All economics is local. We try to hammer on that."
In Illinois, the unemployment rate in September was 6.6 percent, according to preliminary numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Chicago, it was even higher: 7.3 percent.
And the unemployment rate excludes people who would like a job but are not actively looking for one. The jobs report covers those people under different terminology: Jobless people who had not looked for work in the past four weeks but had looked for work in the past year are considered "marginally attached" to the labor force. Within the marginally attached, there are the "discouraged workers"-jobless people who have given up looking for work altogether.
"The unemployment rate can go down, but the question is, did the unemployment rate go down because people found jobs or because they gave up looking for jobs?" asked Ted Dabrowski, vice president of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute.
The BLS also counts those who have had to settle for part-time work because they couldn't find a full-time gig or because their hours were cut back. They're employed, sure-but not as employed as they'd like to be.
And it's hard to talk about jobs without also talking about wages. The jobs report tracks the average hourly wage for private-sector nonfarm workers; over the year, that number has gone up only slightly, according to October numbers.
"People can get jobs, but if they're not any more prosperous, it makes it really difficult on the economy," Dabrowski said.
The tiny increase is disheartening, according to Hamrick, who said wages before the recession went up about 3 percent.
"Americans have gone without any substantial wage increase for a number of years," he said. "So-called average hourly earnings rose 2 percent. We've been kind of stuck there for awhile."
And perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the jobs report is not set in stone. The reports are subject to revision as more accurate data become available-for example, at the end of October's report, the BLS notes that August and September jobs numbers initially were underreported.
"[The jobs report is] inherently going to be all about speed," Wright said. "Data takes a long time to collect, and the monthly jobs report is trying to do it as quickly as possible."