WASHINGTON — Americans are flooding back into the job market at the fastest pace since before the Great Recession, encouraged by steady hiring and some signs of higher pay.
The flow has halted, at least temporarily, one of the economy’s more discouraging trends: the sharp decline in the percentage of people either working or looking for work. That figure fell last year to a four-decade low.
The pickup since then suggests that nearly seven years after the recession ended, Americans are finally more confident that they can find jobs.
In March, nearly 400,000 people began job hunts, though not all found work. Their searching lifted the unemployment rate to 5 percent from 4.9 percent. Employers added 215,000 jobs, the Labor Department said Friday, a solid figure but not enough to keep up with the new job-seekers.
Since last September, 2.4 million people have either found jobs or started looking. The proportion of Americans working or looking for work, known as the “participation rate,” has increased to 63 percent during that time, from 62.4 percent, a 38-year low.
“The rise … over the past six months has been truly astounding, suggesting that the job market is finally pulling discouraged workers off the sidelines,” said James Marple, an economist at TD Bank.