Where Have All The Jobs Gone?

The volume of vacancies advertised on UK job boards has fallen by 69% in the past 2 years. And this is in a market that is abandoning print advertising for digital – The Sunday Times contained only 8 actual job adverts this week.  So do we know just how the job boards that we all use, on a daily basis, are faring in the current economic climate?  We do know, for example, that the official number of unemployed now stands at 2.4 million, and has increased by 220,000 in the past three months.  When people are losing jobs and not finding new ones, we also know that demand is far outstripping supply. There are of course many firms still recruiting, but not in enough numbers, and not for the skills possessed by many of the newly unemployed.  In a healthy job market, brisk circulation is vital; people have the confidence in their ability to move from one job to another, and therefore create a vacancy when they resign.  Lack of confidence, fewer new vacancies and low circulation are all part of the same spiral.  So, fewer advertised jobs, and many more candidates, leads to a sequence of events that is very difficult to reverse.

It’s difficult to find independent indicators of how the recession is directly affecting the job market.  For nine years now though, the AlljobsUK.com Online Recruitment Index has been monitoring the volumes of vacancies advertised on the UK’s most popular job boards.  In 2000, most vacancies were still being advertised in print media, newspapers, trade magazines etc.  However 9 years later, the online recruitment sector is now the automatic place where vacancies are advertised, and print advertising for recruitment is pretty scarce.  That being the case, we would surely expect there to be many more jobs advertised online than ever before, wouldn’t we?

Here we can see a snapshot of the current Online Recruitment Index, from 17^th August.  Across the ten sites, we have a total of 329,076 live job adverts.  This is only slightly higher than the lowest figure ever recorded in 9 years, which was only 2 weeks ago.  To give an idea of the depth of the effects of this recession, the Index is now only 31% of its highest recorded figure, which was as recently as August 2007.

Equally, we can see the relative effects on the specific job volumes with each site.  None are above 50% of their peak figure, and six are below 30%.  Of course we know that each of these job boards have different business models, and use different criteria to count vacancies.  That is why it is especially useful to compare their current and previous figures.  Of all the sites monitored, it is probably Reed.co.uk, which is most significant.  The great bulk of their vacancies are posted there for free, and are therefore not constrained by the cost to advertise.  They also come exclusively from UK recruitment agencies, who are competing fiercely themselves to generate revenue.

So what does mean to the online recruitment industry, and how does it affect the hard-pressed job seekers throughout the UK?  We have heard in the last week that France, Germany, and now Japan have technically come out of recession.  Have their stimulus plans worked, and will ours follow suit?  Analysts project a slow recovery, but this is almost entirely reliant upon a return of confidence internationally.  Dependent upon their parentage, the nature of job boards should mean that they are structured to weather the storm, and adjust to the market place. However, if these figures reflect the rest of the sector, they do suggest that many must be very near the bone indeed.  The inevitable grab for market share, as the state of national employment recovers, will determine the victors.  Brand loyalty has been taken to a low ebb by this recession. If the best jobs are only a click away on another website, then only those boats will be lifted by the high tide, when it comes.