Australian Jobs Getting Harder to Find

ANZ has published its monthly review of jobs advertised in Australia’s major newspapers and on the internet.

• The number of jobs advertised fell by 10.4 % in February, taking the annual fall to 39.8 %.
• The weekly average number of jobs advertised in February was still an apparently healthy 161,583 but is down from over 265,000 a year ago.
• Newspaper job advertisements are now 55.4% lower than a year ago.
• The number of internet job advertisements averaged 153,059 per week, compared with almost 250,000 12 months ago.

Commenting on the figures, ANZ Head of Australian Economics Warren Hogan, said:

“The trends in job advertising in Australia suggest a substantial rise in the unemployment rate is likely. We have revised up our unemployment rate forecasts. We now expect the unemployment rate to reach 6.5% by the end of 2009 and 7.5% by mid 2010. These job advertisement numbers, based on historical relationships, suggests the risks to our forecasts are for higher unemployment.”

“Our assessment is that the latest job ad results are consistent with employment contracting at a 2% annualised pace over the second half of 2009. This in turn suggests that the current downturn in the economy is likely to last throughout 2009, with little prospect of a meaningful recovery before 2010. Recent trends in job advertising are consistent with other indicators which suggest that the Australian economy entered recession in late 2008 and remains in recession in early 2009.”