It is more nuanced than that. The BLS and ADP jobs report numbers sometimes diverge significantly. This is explainable by differences in how the data is sourced and modeled.
Roughly, BLS accurately reflects government employment and then extrapolates to the private sector using a census model that can be several years old. ADP is private sector data and doesn’t reflect government employment. They are essentially sampling disjoint employment pools which leads to some known artifacts.
Sometimes there are large spasms of government job growth through expansion of spending and jobs programs when there is no matching growth in the private sector and the private sector may actually be declining (as seen in ADP data), yet BLS will extrapolate that the private sector must have similarly grown based on the government growth data. Similarly, ADP is generally considered a reasonably accurate model of private sector job growth but doesn’t account for government employment even when it is substantial. ADP can significantly exceed BLS in boom markets.
A heuristic that has been around forever for tracking “productive employment” is that the job market is good when (ADP - BLS) is a positive number and bad when it is negative. Currently, this heuristic is tracking at something like -100k to -150k, which indicates a poor job market.
Roughly, BLS accurately reflects government employment and then extrapolates to the private sector using a census model that can be several years old. ADP is private sector data and doesn’t reflect government employment. They are essentially sampling disjoint employment pools which leads to some known artifacts.
Sometimes there are large spasms of government job growth through expansion of spending and jobs programs when there is no matching growth in the private sector and the private sector may actually be declining (as seen in ADP data), yet BLS will extrapolate that the private sector must have similarly grown based on the government growth data. Similarly, ADP is generally considered a reasonably accurate model of private sector job growth but doesn’t account for government employment even when it is substantial. ADP can significantly exceed BLS in boom markets.
A heuristic that has been around forever for tracking “productive employment” is that the job market is good when (ADP - BLS) is a positive number and bad when it is negative. Currently, this heuristic is tracking at something like -100k to -150k, which indicates a poor job market.