WE HELP YOU LOOK AND SOUND BETTER
Home
Who We Are
What We Do
What People Say
In the News
Recent Releases
Olivier
Inspiritive
Podcasts
Corporate Podcasts
Podcast Classes
NetCastNow & NetCastFast!
Images & Branding
Corporate pages
Student pages
ZENLP
Contact Us
|
From the respected HR news letter "Shortlist". For more than five years the Olivier Internet Job Index has tracked the growth of Australian job ads on the net. In that time the relevance of the traditional indicator newspaper job ads has declined. Perhaps it is now time to abandon the use of newspaper ads as an employment indicator. Read the most recent Olivier media release. Print job ads no longer reliable indicator of national jobs growth Friday 12th May 2006 2:25 pm EST Tracking print job ads is no longer a reliable way to forecast Australia's employment growth, according to leading economists. HSBC chief economist Australia and New Zealand John Edwards told Shortlist this week that the continuing flow of job advertising to the internet had broken the correlation between print job ad indexes and the future of the labour market. Edwards said this had been confirmed over recent months and the most recent ANZ job ad figures were "not at all indicative" of softening labour demand in Australia. Edwards said a more accurate analysis of employment growth would take into account all the new ways that candidates were looking for jobs as this significantly influences the way employers and recruitment companies source candidates. For example, younger job seekers were unlikely to use traditional newspapers to find a job, he said. Edwards also raised concerns about the validity of long-term analysis of job ads as new advertising mediums and programs emerge. "New [online recruitment] technologies are changing so rapidly, as are advertising strategies, so yearly comparisons are hard to track," he said. National Australia Bank group chief economist Alan Oster said analysis of print job ads as a sole indicator of labour demand was "misleading generally". While the ANZ job ads series was still a "reasonable" indicator of employment growth, he said a better measure of employment growth should include hiring intentions. Wider-ranging industry surveys which analysed employers' labour needs in the short and medium-term would provide more accurate forecasts of jobs growth, he said. New job search methods and part-time employment hard to track, says ANZ economist ANZ economist Katie Dean said the bank's job ad series had faced several challenges in recent years such as increased volumes in online job ads and the difficulty of accurately incorporating this new medium into the figures. "The biggest challenge facing the reliability of the ANZ newspaper job ads series in providing an indicator for employment growth over the last few years has been the rise of the internet as a means of job advertising," she said. (The ANZ introduced its internet job ads series alongside the newspaper figures in 1999.) The growth of the recruitment industry also affected the figures, Dean said, as employers using recruitment companies were often less inclined to place job ads in newspapers themselves. Another challenge has been the growth of part-time and casual employment, she said, as employers were not as likely to be advertise these positions in newspapers. Source: Shortlist |