Jeff Smith Former Missouri state senator; political science professor :
Using the absolute number of jobs created as a gauge of employment trends can be deceiving for a couple simple reasons.
1) The economy needs to add somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So the first couple hundred thousand jobs added generally won't reduce unemployment because of a growing denominator.
2) The unemployment rate excludes millions of people who common sense suggests should be considered unemployed, because of the Bureau of Labor Statistics definition of "labor force," which excludes: a) those working just a few hours a week who want to work full-time, b) marginally attached workers (temps, etc), and c) discouraged workers (those who have given up looking for work and are thus considered "non-labor").
Since millions of people fall into one of these categories (especially the third category, as the number of discouraged middle-aged workers remains stubbornly high), there is substantial “hidden unemployment.” Consequently, adding jobs doesn't necessarily reduce unemployment when the people who get them fall in one of these three broad categories, since they were not part of the denominator (the labor force) in the first place.
As Mark Twain noted, there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. So - given the quirks of BLS methodology - we probably shouldn't put too much stock in monthly numbers like this.