With two days to go before the announcement of the official unemployment figures for July, a couple of leading indicators gave conflicting messages about what to expect.  ADP’s monthly look at private-sector growth shows a tepid advance of 114,000 for the just-concluded month, but this report has a decidedly mixed track record:

Employment in the U.S. nonfarm private business sector  rose 114,000 from June to July on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report® released today.  The estimated advance in employment from May to June was revised down modestly to 145,000, from the initially reported 157,000.

ADP provides payroll services to millions of American businesses and has access to easily-accessible data from which to make its projections, in some ways more direct than the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which uses surveys.  However, the ADP report has proven somewhat unreliable as a month-to-month indicator.  The revision from last month still leaves the ADP report more than seven times higher than the job-creation numbers from BLS in June, which came to only 18,000.

CNBC looks at another measure and finds darker clouds on the horizon … unexpectedly?

Meanwhile, an unexpected increase in private sector job cuts in July raised the number of announced U.S. job cuts to 66,414 in July, a 16-month high, according to a report on downsizing activity by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

It was the first month this year that the government was not the biggest job-cutting sector.

The job cuts were up 60 percent from June, and 59 percent higher than the 41,676 layoffs recorded in July 2010. Its was the largest monthly total since March 2010.

The pace of layoffs has increased rapidly, CNBC reports:

The pace of job cuts picked up steam in recent months. At the end of March, year-to-date job cuts were 28 percent lower than the same period a year ago. The gap at the end of July has now narrowed to 8 percent lower than the same time in 2010, with a total of 312,220 cuts so far this year.

CNBC reports further that the projection for Friday’s unemployment report will be a net gain of 85,000 jobs and 9.2% unemployment.  I’m guessing no more than 40,000 net jobs gained and an uptick to 9.3% in unemployment, and that may be overly optimistic at this point.