Labor-Market Tightness Index →

A compensation-benchmarking agent reads ADW-045 monthly; when the labor tightness score rises above 60 (it peaked at 87.8 and has ranged from 0 to 87.8 across 123 observations, currently at 43.2 in the 35th percentile on a falling trend), it triggers a salary-band review workflow for hard-to-fill roles, cross-checks the openings_to_unemployed_ratio against the prior month to confirm direction, and suppresses alerts when confidence is below 0.8 to avoid noise from JOLTS revision months — methodology_version ensures the 36-month z-score window is consistently applied.

A CHRO at a mid-market manufacturing company uses ADW-045's tightness_label and ratio_z to time its annual merit-increase cycle: when the score was above 70 (as it was for extended periods in 2021-2022), the team pre-budgeted 5-7% raises to stay competitive; as the score has fallen to the 35th percentile today, the same IOM signal is informing a return to 3% bands — replacing a quarterly JOLTS manual download that HR previously ran through an Excel model.