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SEEK ads down sharply

by Brett Iredale October 13, 2008




In recent months SEEK ads have consistently sat at around 210,000 jobs or higher.  Interestingly this morning they are down to 191,000. 

I very much doubt this is related to Kevin Rudd's warning yesterday that Australia's jobless rate will rise.  There could be any number of reasons for this drop and no doubt they will bounce back again soon. 

We will be watching that space with interest.


Entry filed under: General, Industry News

6 CommentsAdd your own

1. Newspaper Magnet October 13, 2008 at 3:54pm

It would be great to see these stats weekly here, as well as those from CareerOne and MyCareer. Are you seeing any dip in ad volumes going through JobAdder at all?

2. Brett I October 13, 2008 at 4:03pm

yes we do track them internally and all job boards are down right across the board.
We are not seeing changes within JobAdder yet and don't expect to for a while because all our clients are under contract with the job boards. I expect this will start changing as contracts get reviewed in the coming months....

3. Kevin October 13, 2008 at 7:04pm

Just remember when looking at raw job numbers from the big job boards, for each real job there are often many ads, at least in the case where the job has been given to one or more recruitment agencies.

If a job has been given to say three agencies there will be a minimum of 3 ads. But if those agencies cross post the ad in multiple categories, then 'refresh' their ads each week (meaning re-post them so they go to the top of the list), then one job could easily become 10-15 ads.

Check out this example of the same ad repeated 5 times by one agency http://tinyurl.com/seek-x5

I'm not trying to single anyone out here, this is a commonplace occurrence on the big job boards because of the way they are structured. A quick perusal of this company's ads indicates that every job they are advertising is on Seek 3-5 times.

I've seen a lot worse from other advertisers, I recall once seeing the same job on the same job board 13 times, from one recruiter!

Another thing to consider is that 210,000 jobs is probably close to the all time high for Seek and is more than double the count about 4 years ago.

So don't panic just yet :)

4. Kevin October 14, 2008 at 9:43pm

It's back to 198,150 today - a 6000+ ads variance in 24 hours!

Still a far cry from the 80,000 jobs 4 years ago.

5. Carey Eaton October 15, 2008 at 9:23am

I should point out that in a weekly cycle on any job board, the number of jobs at any one point in time can vary by as much as 10% a week at 'normal' times during a year.

This fluctuation can be much higher in the Christmas / January / Easter / Financial Year End seasons, and around big events like the Melbourne Cup.

Kevin's right to point out the difference between the number of ads published in online or offline media versus the number of actual jobs in the economy. The trends correlate of course.

There's also a big difference between the job count on the site at any one point in time versus the number of new jobs that cascade through the system during a month. Its only the latter one that correlates to job board revenue.

If you want a good indicator of trends in job and application volumes per industry, I'd recommend the SEEK Employment Index available here:

http://www.seek.com.au/investor/employmentindex.ascx

6. Brett October 15, 2008 at 9:48am

Gents thanks for the input but don't read too much into the original post.

And Carey thanks for the link to the SEEK index. I agree that it is a useful resource - however I do find I get an uncontrollable urge to scratch my own eyes out after a few minutes of looking at the report :) It reminds me of work experience at uni doing journal reconciliations on giant reams of form feed paper. It just needs holes down the sides and perforations across the top and I'd be able to print it from my Vax machine.

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