Economists seemingly rallied together for a uniformed response to the August employment report released Friday: The jobs data runs contrary to recent economic indicators and should be taken with a grain of salt, the experts told CNBC on Friday.
To one stock market observer, though, the jobs report accurately represents how the economy still struggles to gain a footing following the Great Recession.
"I thought it was what you would have expected. It's in the fitting of what we've seen with the economy for the last couple of years," James A. Bianco, president of Bianco Research, told CNBC. "We've traded 224,000 private sector jobs in the last six months. The same number we did in 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2013, '12 and '11 produced subpar growth, and I see no reason why to think that this is all of the sudden a sign that the economy is going to break out."
From the Institute for Supply Management's index of national factory activity, to high consumer confidence and falling jobless claims, recent indicators point to an improved economy, economists told CNBC. But those indicators are actually a poor way of measuring the economy following the 2007-2009 recession, Bianco said on "Squawk on the Street."
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Take the ISM's Purchasing Managers Index, for example, which pulls together a read on new orders, inventory levels, production, supplier deliveries and jobs data.
"[The] Purchasing Managers report has been unambiguously strong for years. I think it's because we've lost a lot of the weak purchasing managers," he said. "They've left the survey force and it's unambiguously strong. It says the economy is great and it never seems to play out, and it's been going on for years right now."
Bianco poked holes in consumer confidence, too.
"That's always been a suspect indicator because it follows the stock market," he said. "It just tells you what the stock market did last month."
Read MoreDon't believe weak August jobs data: Economists
Meantime, jobless claims have continued to fall for so long that its lost meaning, he said.
In turn, Bianco said these indicators "just aren't very good."
"Yet that's what we cite for why the economy is strong and here we are five years after the recession has ended, still waiting for the economy to get strong," he said. "We have weak growth, and I think we need to start asking the question. 'Why has this economy been so anemic?' but instead we keep saying 'right now it's going to start taking off' and we've been saying that for three years and it just hasn't been materializing."
—By CNBC's Drew Sandholm