The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its little ballyhooed Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for December Tuesday, and the numbers weren't pretty.

The JOLTS report estimated that the economy added only 67,000 jobs in December, below the 75,000 reading in the main Labor Department report released last Friday.

That made December the worst month for job generation since August 2012, CNBC reported. Layoffs rose to a four-month high of 109,000, and employers hired less workers than in any month since June.

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The quits rate, the portion of workers who left their job voluntarily slipped to 1.7 percent from 1.8 percent in November. That's bad news because it indicates fewer workers have confidence in the job market.

"There certainly is a lot of noise out there regarding jobs data, but . . . this latest release confirms the negative sentiment induced by the establishment [jobs] survey" last Friday, Nick Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx, wrote in a commentary obtained by CNBC.

"It is the first uniformly negative report seen in over a year."

To be sure, Colas noted that JOLTS data tend to be "choppy," but added that "December's edition is quite a bit troublesome, especially with the backdrop of last Friday's jobs report."

But Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities, expressed pessimism about job growth before the JOLTS report even came out.

"I’m skeptical of the ramp-up that everyone is expecting this year," he told Bloomberg. "There doesn’t appear to be any acceleration in employment growth."

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