​Hiring picked up slightly in June, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Combined quits and layoffs stayed pretty much the same.New JOLTS data also showed job openings fell a bit, but overall the number of job openings has been trending up since the beginning of this year. Employers — like all of us — have faced a lot of uncertainty since Donald Trump took office last year. “From tariffs and taxes and war and energy price spikes and changes to immigration,” said Aaron Sojourner, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. All that has made many companies reluctant to hire.“So they've been kind of frozen like deer in the headlights, just like not sure what's coming at them, don't want to jump left, don't want to jump right, just hold still,” Sojourner said.This year, some employers finally decided they need to make a move and bring more people on board. That is reflected in the slowly rising number of job openings, said Tuan Nguyen, an economist at RSM.Companies are looking to hire, he said, because the overall economy is doing OK and there’s demand for their products. “We’ve seen over the past few months, sentiment is improving, consumers still spending, and businesses are spending more when it comes to [capital expenditures],” Nguyen said.That’s why there are more job openings in industries like construction, transportation, and retail, he said.If openings keep rising and they translate into actual hires, the labor market could break out of the pattern it’s been in for a while where companies don’t hire much and they’re also not firing many people.That pattern works fine for people who have jobs. But people who lose jobs are having a hard time finding new ones, said Pavlina Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College.“There's a segment of the population for whom the labor market is not working, even if, as a whole, the labor market seems to be in a steady state,” she said.The number of long-term unemployed people has been slowly climbing. Tcherneva said job openings would need to rise a lot faster for more of them to find work.