For the 5th consecutive month Job Ads have fallen in Australia. I take a professional interest in The Age classifieds on Saturdays and have seen a dramatic fall-off in advertising for Sales and Marketing roles in FMCG. This week I could not find one in the Early General News and very few in the Classifieds section.

The Age today reports a 1.4% fall in online and newspaper job ads in September. This is also 2.2% lower than last September. This survey is coordinated by the ANZ bank and is a leading index in regards to employment growth and the unemployment rate. These declines are not big numbers though, and are showing a controlled downward trend that will have only a moderate effect on the unemployment rate.

From a recruiting side, good candidates are still hard to find and even harder to shift out of an organisation that they are not entirely unhappy with. It is my belief that the nervousness concerning both the domestic and international economy has just made both candidates and companies more conservative with their decisions. Therefore we have only seen this minor reduction in job ads not a massive drop off.

There are a few recruitment freezes out in the market but not enough to make a big difference to good candidates.

Tim