These days, when searching for good economic news, you have to lower your expectations somewhat. You have to remind yourself that the years preceding the GFC were abnormally good.

Last week’s latest job vacancy figures are a case in point. They agree nicely with the improvement in the unemployment rate observed over the past couple of months but they firmly sit within the “good, not great” category. For the moment, that is perhaps what we need to be content with.

While unemployment figures look to the past – giving us really only a picture of what has happened – job vacancy data allows us to look a bit more into the future.

While the actual data relates to May, job vacancies give an indicator of future employment. It takes a while to go from posting a job ad to the filling of the position. So more vacancies now means more employment later.

In May we saw 155,700 job vacancies – up 1.5% (in trend terms) from the February figures, and up 7.1% in the past 12 months:

That’s good to see as it means the annual growth of job vacancies has been improving since August 2013.

But when we take a bit of a step back and look at the past 15 years, we find that 7.1% is hardly great. Annual growth looks to have hit a plateau, and 7% is well below the peaks of previous years:

While economists do look at the growth of vacancies, more often they look at two other metrics: the number of job vacancies as a percentage of people in the labour force (known as the job vacancy rate) and the number of unemployed per vacancy.

The job vacancy rate is linked with the unemployment rate in a relationship that is plotted on a “Beveridge curve” – essentially, as the job vacancy rate goes up the unemployment rate is supposed to go down.

Right now the relationship is sitting pretty much on the 20-year trend line. With an unemployment rate of 6.0% you would expect the vacancy rate to be 1.25%, which is where it is. To get unemployment down to 5.5% would need a vacancy rate of about 1.31%:

Photograph: Greg Jericho

And certainly, it is good to see the relationship back in some sync, because, from August 2013 to August 2014, when job vacancy rate improved, oddly the unemployment rate worsened.

Thus, from August 2013 to August 2014, the average number of unemployed competing for each job vacancy increased from 4.96 to 5.17.

Since then it has fallen, and now sits at 4.86:

While that is better than it was a year or so ago, some wider context reinforces the “good not great” position:

The current number of unemployed per vacancy over the past year (including now) is worse than at any point since the global financial crisis. Yet it’s better than it was prior to the mining boom getting going in 2004.

It’s nothing that would have you talking about an economic miracle, but it’s pretty solid nonetheless.

So where are the vacancies? Well, let’s just say it is a bit late to go west, young man. In the past three years the number of job vacancies in Western Australia has fallen 37%, compared with 16% in all of Australia. And in the past year, while vacancies have been growing in Australia, they still fell about 7% in WA:

Interestingly, after a big fall in 2013 and 2014, the number of vacancies in the ACT has recently improved – mostly off the back of an increase in public-sector vacancies. The number of vacancies remains at near-record lows, but the freeze of public service work under the Abbott government does look to be thawing slightly.

That is also reflected in the number of unemployed in the ACT fighting for each vacancy, falling from 3.4 in August last year to just 2.7 now. That remains astonishingly low, however, compared with most other states.

Last year, Victoria was second only to South Australia as the hardest mainland state in which to get work. In August 2014, on average, 7.1 unemployed people were going for each vacancy – that is now down to 5.4.

Western Australia remains the best state for the unemployed but the situation is getting worse, and quickly.

Three years ago you damn near just had to walk down a Perth street to get offered a job. Back then there were just 1.5 unemployed people per vacancy; now it is 3.8. That is still lower than in New South Wales where there are 4.5 unemployed per vacancy, but the gap is narrowing:

And of course it also matters what type of jobs are on offer.

Not surprisingly, the big fall in job vacancies has come in the mining industry. In the past three years there has been a 64% fall in the number of mining-job vacancies. Even in the past year the fall has continued. In May there were 1,130 fewer mining job vacancies than 12 months ago.

By contrast there has been solid growth of job vacancies in administration and support; professional, scientific and technology; and wholesale trade industries:

Because we don’t know the number of unemployed in each industry (because, for example, someone who is unemployed might end up getting a job in any industry) we can’t do either a job vacancy rate or unemployed per vacancy figure for each industry. But we can compare the number of vacancies per person employed in each industry, to give us a bit of an idea.

And again, here the news is bleak for those wishing to work in mining. Three years ago the number of mining vacancies was equivalent to 4.7% of those employed in the industry – now it is just 1.5% - suggesting the industry has pretty much got its fill of workers for now.

So the job vacancy figures reinforce the overall picture of the economy quite nicely. The mining sector is no longer the boom place, and New South Wales and Victoria are the states to be.

This accords with the recent population figures, also released last week, which showed that in 2014, for the first time since the mining boom began, more people moved from Western Australia than moved to it:

While the job vacancy figures overall give a bit of a sense that things are at least looking up, the Department of Employment’s “leading indicator of employment” index – which uses a combination of forward-looking economic data and consumer sentiment – shows that the good not great vibe is in place.

The past three months have seen the index in positive territory:

As with the job-vacancy figures the growth is pretty flat. Things are looking up, if only marginally so. But after such a long period in which the news has always at least had a tinge of gloom, at this point we probably should be thankful we have at least that.