American companies are finally getting comfortable enough with the economy’s prospects to add new workers at a very healthy pace, after years of saying they lacked the confidence to hire people aggressively during a fitful recovery.

Employers added 288,000 jobs in June, the Labor Department said Thursday, the fifth month in a row that hiring has topped the 200,000 mark. The unemployment rate dipped to 6.1 percent last month, the best reading since September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers turned what had been a mild recession into an economic rout.

Since then, many segments of the economy have rebounded — including corporate profits, Wall Street and the housing market — even as payrolls inched higher at a grindingly slow rate. Now, these broader economic gains are prompting businesses to actually hire significantly more workers in response to growing demand, rather than taking half steps, like adding hours to stretch existing work forces.

Image Aaron Goode, 19, was recently hired by an air-conditioner maintenance company in Sunny Isles, Fla. Credit... Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The prospect of stronger economic growth, with healthier consumer spending as more Americans find work, helped to lift the stock market to new highs. On Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 17,000 for the first time, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index recorded a new high and the tech-heavy Nasdaq hit its highest level since the go-go days of 2000.