Employers hung out more help-wanted signs in November as the job market unexpectedly rebounded.

U.S. employers had 8.1 million job openings in November, up from the 7.8 million in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday. That was the highest since May, and beat the expectations of forecasters, who had called for the number of openings to stay flat, according to a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

However, the uptick did little to change the overall picture of the job market, which is one where hiring and layoffs are both relatively slow compared to the post-pandemic era of 2022 and 2023. There were 1.1 jobs for every unemployed worker in November, down from the record 2-1 ratio in mid-2022, and slightly below the pre-pandemic ratio of 1.2-1.

Layoffs remained rare, with the layoff rate staying at 1.1%, near the historically low levels where it's been hovering since 2021. Workers were little more inclined to quit than employers were to let them go: the quit rate dropped to 1.9% from 2.1% in October. The lower the quitting rate, the less confident workers are that they'll find a higher-paid position elsewhere.

On the other hand, the hiring rate slowed for the second week in a row to 3.3% from 3.4% in October.

"The report shows an entrenched labor market,"  Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote in a commentary. "Despite more job openings, hiring is weakening, workers are even more reluctant to quit their jobs, and layoffs are low. It feels like a wait-and-see scenario as employers and employees alike wait for the next administration’s policies."