Lots of jobs?
There is a flood (in NZ terms) of people looking for jobs because they have been made redundant. While the message appears to be that most companies are not advertising for staff, there are jobs consistently being advertised in all walks of life. It is certainly a lot less than ‘normal’ – however what is ‘normal’?
I have a theory on this. We’ve mentioned before the merry-go-round that appeared to be the NZ job market, with lots of jobs requiring specialist skills and few people with the required skills applying for them. My theory is that when lots of people are moving between employers, there are at least twice as many jobs being advertised as actually exist.
you may think.
But think about this – there is the job I’ve just taken which is still being advertised online because they’ve not cancelled the advert yet, and the job at my current employer I’m leaving because they want to find someone else to do the job I was doing. To anyone outside that change, you see two jobs advertised, however there is only one actual vacancy.
Plus there are other companies who advertise a job that may not entirely exist, they just want to snap up someone who is spare in case they aren’t available when the company actually has a sudden need for that sort of person in six months time. That I think is driven a bit by a perception of a shortage of people. Certainly I’ve heard of employers who, nine months ago, were having to offer jobs at the end of the interview. Otherwise by the time they decided to offer someone a job, they’ve already been snapped up by the company who was interviewing that person the same day.
With a lot fewer people moving, the apparent surplus of jobs evaporates. As does the perception that there isn’t enough people with the experience needed.
With the banks holding back on recruitment, and Govt. departments having to go through proper budget reviews to ‘trim’ their expenditure, and your existing employer thinking that they’ll be able to split your role between three (already over worked) colleagues, and hence get away with not replacing you when you leave, the net result is that there are certainly fewer jobs advertised.
Does the level of job adverts represent a more realistic measure of how many jobs are out there and available?
So in who’s interest is it to talk up any ‘flood’ of job seekers? Well any company that is still looking for staff. They can get away with offering lower salaries, since people are scared into accepting the first job which comes along, in case they don’t get another offer. I don’t doubt there are numerous people out there who are struggling to find a job. It took me over three months to get a new job offer when I was made redundant, and then two came along at the same time.
Now, I’m not saying I have an answer to this. It’s just a theory. Like with a lot of things, if we stop panicing and look at what the financial/share/job/grocery market is doing with a bit of perspective, things don’t look so bad.
Good luck to anyone out there looking for a job – there are loads. To misquote Dolf De Roos, the job deal of the decade comes along every week.
Related posts:
- Six figure jobs
- Over 1,320 jobs paying over $100,000 in New Zealand
- There are 735 jobs in New Zealand right now paying over $100k.
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