The number of applications per job is up more than 80 per cent from the very low level a year ago.(ABC News)
Job ads slumped 5 per cent in October and are nearly 20 per cent lower over the past year, with hospitality and tourism leading the drop despite the looming peak summer holiday season.
Job advertisements are considered a prime indicator of future employment levels, and the slowdown in postings on Australia's largest employment website could point to a dramatic fall in employment growth over the coming months.
Perhaps employers have begun winding up their hiring activity early for the year, noted Seek's Australia-New Zealand managing director Kendra Banks.
With two months until the end of the year we would expect both hiring and application activity to slow over the coming months, before picking up again early next year.
The jobs website's data are seasonally adjusted, meaning the fall in ads last month was out of the ordinary for a typical October.
Also out of the ordinary was an 11.6 per cent plunge in hospitality and tourism job ads at a time of year when one might typically expect businesses in this sector to be lining up new staff for the peak summer period.
Job ads in the sector were up 18 per cent on pre-COVID October 2019 levels, but this was much weaker than the growth seen for other major employing industries, such as education, manufacturing and transport, trades and services, or healthcare.
Despite the proximity to the busy summer season, hospitality and tourism recorded the greatest drop in ad volume, likely due to inflation and the rising cost of living putting continued pressure on businesses, observed Ms Banks.
The fall in hospitality jobs was driven by double-digit percentage declines in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT, the regions that led the slump in job ads last month and over the past year.
Victoria, NSW lead fall in job ads
Job ads in Victoria are down 26.5 per cent on last year's levels, after a 6.8 per cent drop last month, with New South Wales ads down 24.6 per cent and the ACT 21.1 per cent.
Seek said Victoria's fall was concentrated in Melbourne, particularly the construction and industrial sectors.
All states and territories recorded a fall in job ads from last year's extremely elevated levels, but the Northern Territory (-0.6 per cent) and Tasmania (-2.5 per cent) posted only marginal declines.
Other than hospitality, the biggest job ad declines in October were in design and architecture (-8.1 per cent), retail (-7.7 per cent), call centres and customer service (-6.6 per cent), advertising, arts and the media (-6.4 per cent), and banking and financial services (-6.3 per cent).
But only three of 28 industry sectors saw an increase in job ads last month — legal, consulting and farming/animals/conservation, all 2 per cent or below.
In a further sign of future jobs market weakness, applications per job rose again in September by 4.1 per cent and were 81.1 per cent higher than a year earlier, as more people chase fewer job vacancies.
But, despite the recent downturn, job advertisements are still 16.6 per cent higher than in the weak economic climate that prevailed in October 2019, just ahead of the COVID pandemic.
For comparison, the unemployment rate in October 2019 was 5.3 per cent, according to the seasonally adjusted ABS data, compared to3.7 per cent in October 2023 in data released last week.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-20/job-ads-dive-in-australia-s-most-populous-states/103119460
