The private sector added only 158,000 jobs in March, but February’s private sector job total was increased to 215,000.

Diverging_ArrowsThe private sector added only 158,000 jobs in March, ADP recently announced — lower than the 205,000 Bloomberg News consensus estimate.

However, February’s private sector job total increase was revised higher to 215,000 jobs from the initial estimated 198,000-job gain.

Institutional investors use the private ADP employment figure as a rough gauge of the private sector’s employment status, but economists caution that the report is not strongly correlated with the more-telling U.S. Non-Farm Payroll Report, which includes both private sector and public sector jobs. That report, for March, will be released on Friday at 8:30 a.m. EDT by the U.S. Labor Department.

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Source: Joseph Lazzaro | International Business Times | April 3, 2013