In their polling every day, the Gallup Poll asks respondents if their place of work was increasing or decreasing its workforce. They take the number saying increasing and subtract the number saying decreasing. The number remaining is what they call the "job creation index". A positive number means more businesses are hiring than are laying off, and a negative number would mean the opposite. In other words, the higher the number is, the better for a state.
They polled 210,448 adults between January 2nd and December 30th of 2016, and the margin of error for their polling on this question is only 1 point. The numbers in the charts above represent the job creation index for the year of 2016.
One more thing. Just because a state is creating a high number of jobs doesn't mean those jobs are good jobs. They could easily be low-wage and low-benefit jobs -- as a large number of the new jobs being created are (jobs that don't pay a livable wage). For instance, Nevada has the highest job creation index -- but are those high-paying manufacturing jobs, or are they low-wage service jobs (isn't the latter more likely?).
