(Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Monday the United States must accelerate job growth, but he said the country was not experiencing a "jobless recovery" as it pulled out of a recession.

"We've seen eight months in a row of private sector job growth. We're actually seeing more job growth so far in this recovery than we did in the last recovery that we had back in 2001," Obama said during an interview on NBC television.

"The problem is we just lost so many jobs because of the crisis that we've got a much bigger hole to fill, and that means we're going to have to accelerate job growth and we've got to do everything we can to focus on that."