Yesterday, the National Skills Commission released its Internet Vacancy Index (IVI) – a monthly count of online job advertisements – which signaled that the Great Australian Jobs Boom might have come to an end.
The IVI showed that total job advertisements have topped out at around 300,000 after roughly doubling from their pre-pandemic level:
SEEK’s August Employment Report shows similar, with job ads declining for the third consecutive month; albeit they remain 30.9% higher year-on-year:
Applications per job ad also rose for the second consecutive month, increasing 3.5% from the month prior, the largest increase to be recorded this year.
SEEK’s managing director, Kendra Banks, explains the result as follows:
“There has been a flattening of the curve for both job ads and applications per job ad over the past quarter. As job ads ease away from record-high levels, candidate applications are spread less thinly across the great variety in the market, leading to incremental increases in applications per job ad.
“From a quarterly perspective, all sectors have declined compared to the three months prior, though with job ads in most industries still extremely high compared to pre-pandemic levels, this demonstrates a stabilisation of the market from the peaks recorded earlier in the year, rather than a significant downward trend.
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s aggressive interest rate hikes will obviously work to slow the economy and curtail jobs growth. Given there is a two to three-month lag between rate hikes and their impact on mortgage holders, most of the tightening to date has yet to be felt.
The major concern is that the aggressive monetary tightening will cause the economy to hit the wall next year at the same time as the Albanese Government floods the nation with migrants, in turn spiking unemployment.
