Rob Clark: Seek Country Manager on the increase in job ads for the month

There's hope that employment numbers could be a sign of economic growth. 

Seek job ads are up 3% for the month, with retail and government jobs increasing. 

Seek Country Manager Rob Clark told Mike Hosking there's still an overall downward trend, but it's promising. 

He says after five months of declining ads, it shows people are getting ready for more spending, with retail, hospitality, and tourism, gearing up for the summer period. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Our job market. What can we see while we have surprises?
July adds are up three percent, and that means they're
up for the first time since January. Listing's up three percent,
nearly one and four of those jobs. By the way,
we're in retail, closely followed by government and defense. Seek
Country manager Rob Clark is with us. Rob, very good
morning to you.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Good morning.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
At first, blush, this all seems a bit weird. Is
the three percent a blip for a month or does
a summer of jobs come calling?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I wouldn't quite call it a trend yet. What we
do see is the trends are still firmly downwards. But
in July, yes, we saw a monitoring increase off the
back of what it was particularly weak results in June
and May.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Okay, so twenty percent plus of the jobs in retail.
How do we explain this when no one's going shopping.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Yeah, so we think a lot of that is for
gearing up for the summer season. So it's an anticipation
of perhaps increased activity, just as we've seen in hospitality
and tourism, which is also peaked all spiked in the
July results.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Can you see light at the end of the This
is an increasingly oft used phrase of late light at
the end of the tunnel. RB's moved. Interest rates are moving.
Is there something in the job market to see here?

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Well, look, we're always hoping for optimism, and you know,
whilst this isn't a trend, it's encouraging at the very least,
and we've seen some other sort of macroeconomic indicators that
are perhaps slightly brighter than we've seen in the past.
But you know, we don't want to be too hopeful
because we just need to look at the long term
trend to see that it has been down traveled down

(01:30):
quite significantly over the last little while. So we're hopeful,
but we're not out of the woods yet.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
How variable is the regional story.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
We do get variation in the regions. It was pleasing
to see that, you know, most of the regions were
up in July, and particularly in areas like construction. But
we do see some bounce. So if you remember last month,
South and was up and this month it's down, So
we do see a bit more bounce in the regions.
But the urban center's reasonably strong, low single digit growth
in July.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
OK about the magic ads per job or applications.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Per read still very very competitive if you are a
job seeker. There are still sixteen thousand jobs on Sikh,
so you know there's still a decent number of jobs,
but just the number of people applying per job is
at all time high, so it's pretty competitive.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Good on you, Rob, Nice to catch up. Rob Clark,
who is the Seekh country manager with us this morning.
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