Looking for an IT pro role? There aren’t a lot of them about right now. According to job advertising site Indeed, vacancies listed in December fell by a whopping 18.8 per cent.
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That’s the third month in a row of declines — IT job ads had fallen 12 per cent in November and 5.8 per cent in October.
To be fair, December isn’t traditionally a time when companies go on massive hiring sprees, and we’d expect January to be even worse. However, the decline for IT was worse than for the overall market, where advertised vacancies on Indeed fell by 16.3 per cent.
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3 responses to “IT Job Ads Slump For The Third Month In A Row”
Having worked for a key online jobs board in the past, I have found that there are two key reasons for this slump:
1. The end of year break is a time when hiring managers and people applying are both on holidays so no one advertises. Makes sense to me. If they did hire, they’d also have to pay for public holidays that the person doesnt work on.
2. The end of financial year that had past meant companies knew their budget for the year and probably advertised for key roles heavily during the start (around July) and therefore many exhaust their budgets half way through, or hold off advertising because their expecting some changes to occur in the new year.
Since the end of the financial year is June – not December, your 2nd point is largely irrelevant. Only a few companies, usually American, have a financial year that coincides with the calendar year.
Neither of your points explain why there has been a significant decline for 3 months in a row.
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My point was (and really I dont want to have to spell it out for you, but here goes anyway…) that many departments knowing what their budget will be for Financial Year 2014-2015 would have often exhausted the amount on hiring by December 2014 because they tend to hire a lot as soon as the new financial year starts and they have budget to do so. This happens, and having worked with the largest private companies and recruitment companies in my role at an online jobs board I know for a fact this is the case.
They do explain why there is a decline in general around the end of the year. When working for the online jobs board (about 6-7 years ago now), at their peak they would reach 70K-75K job ads. By December they would hit a low 30K-33K job ads. This decline would become quite evident by mid October and the trend would continue to spiral downwards over the next two months. It only really ever started to go up mid February. So what is being stated in this article is nothing new. All job ads, especially IT (because many companies only work on skeleton staff over the festive season) would take a massive hit in jobs advertised between mid-November to mid-February.