I think Neil Irwin has things accurately sized up:

There is nothing in the June jobs numbers, released Thursday morning, that signals economic catastrophe. But the closer you look, the more reason there is to feel just a little glum.

The nation added 223,000 jobs last month, which is a perfectly good number. The unemployment rate fell to 5.3 percent, from 5.5 percent, the lowest since April 2008, when the Great Recession was a mere infant. If you look only at the big glaring headline numbers, in other words, these numbers are somewhere between good and great.

The disappointments come in the finer details. This report is the opposite of a dark cloud with a silver lining…

First, on that solid payrolls number. A few years ago, we all would have been thrilled with the 223,000 jobs added in June. But, when coupled with revisions that whacked 60,000 jobs off the April and May numbers, there is a modest downtrend evident in job growth in the last few months….

the next reason for disappointment in the latest numbers. For years now economy-watchers have been wondering when robust job creation would pull people who left the labor force during the recession back in.

The reverse happened in June. The labor force participation rate — the proportion of the population either working or looking for a job – tumbled three-tenths of a percentage point to 62.6 percent, which is the lowest in modern times. You have to go all the way back to 1977 to find a month when it was lower….

The combination of slowing job growth and a lack of progress in growth of the labor force is no conundrum, but the third piece of not-so-good news out of the new report is.

Despite a falling unemployment rate, a rising numbers of jobs and fewer Americans out there apparently wanting to take those jobs, there was no progress toward rising wages. Average hourly earnings were unchanged at $24.95. What had been a 2.3 percent annual growth rate in hourly earnings in May fell to 2 percent in June….

You might expect the environment to be ripe for meaningful wage gains in 2015: The unemployment rate is inching closer to 5 percent, employers keep adding around three million jobs a year, and people aren’t coming back into the labor force to fill them….

Something has to give: Either employers will have to raise wages to coax more people into the labor force, creating a virtuous cycle of higher income growth and a larger economic pie, or job creation will have to slow way down to reflect the reality that the wages currently on offer aren’t enough to persuade more people to work.

Regarding Irwin’s last line, there’s another possibility:  Employers won’t hire the available candidates at the wage they are willing to offer.  It’s the flip side of the “raise wages to attract the workers you want” argument.  An employer may offer $100k per year to do [X], [Y], and [Z], but none of the applicants are qualified and the employer isn’t inclined to train them.  The employer continues to advertise the position but it goes unfilled.