Employers hire, but unemployment rises?!

"We're still in this zone where we don't have these two surveys agreeing," said Heidi Shierholz, economist for the Economic Policy Institute. "Was April positive or negative? Our two major surveys don't agree on that simple fact."

So why the disparity?

The Labor Department compiles the jobs report based on two separate surveys. The first survey collects business and government payroll data. The second -- which is used to calculate the unemployment rate -- surveys American households.

The two don't always move in lock step. Economists prefer to focus on the payrolls data because it's less volatile and has a larger sample size.

But most people agree that a 9% unemployment rate is still too high.