Australian recruitment starting to feel the pinch
Ouch. While Australia might not have been hit as hard as many counties in the economic downturn, the employment market is starting to hurt. That's reflected in job advertisements for October. The ANZ report shows downturns for both newspapers and the Internet.
Newspaper job ads, measured by ANZ fell by 12 percent on September and are now a whopping 35 percent lower than a year ago. That will be hurting revenues. Internet ads are down by around 5 percent on both September and the previous October.
The largest declines occurred in the mining dependent states where many companies have put on hold thoughts of expansion. However all states recorded falls, demonstrating a general lack of confidence,
Anecdotally, it would appear that it's the part time and bottom end of the market which are suffering the most - for now. Hospitality and service industries have been hit the hardest. White collar, government and executive positions have not fallen near as fast, That's about the only good news for newspapers as these ads tend to be larger and more expensive.
In the midst of this gloom there is a small ray of joy. News Ltd's CareerOne is experiencing an healthy increase in traffic. Its monthly visitation is up some 9 percent on September and more than 40 percent on the previous October. It now receives more than 1.4 million unique visitors a month.
Full information at http://www.anz.com/australia/support/library/aj/aj20081103.pdf
