Street. Everyday I walk from my hotel to work, as part of that work I
walk past a "Reed Recruitment" office, during the time I have been
taking this small amount of exercise the numbers displayed in a rolling
neon display make for sobering reading.
The numbers in question are the number of Jobs available online at
Reed.co.uk, the number appears to change every four weeks, so cannot at
any time be deemed as being up to date, but they are interesting for the
decline in numbers seen since late September. I cannot remember the
number to the nearest digit, but for each month I can remember the
number of thousands displayed and they break down as this
Sept 08 -- 168,000
Oct 08 --159,000
Nov 08 -- 139,000
Dec 08 -- 131,000
From that we see that the number of vacancies has dropped by over 25%
in just 4 months, and remember these are jobs that are online, so this
is s nationwide snapshot, and Reeds cover a large portfolio of job
types. If that is repeated over all the agencies out there, it
represents a huge reduction in available jobs and a worrying trend for
the future.
One point that I cannot compare against is any seasonality in the
figures, i.e. would they be expected to drop anyway? I suspect that for
October and November things would not normally be anywhere near as bad
as these figures suggest.
Add to any picture the numbers concealed by use of "Incapacity Benefit"
and other tricks to reduce the size of the Dole queue and I would think
that the number of people chasing jobs, or at least not in a job is
probably already higher than the number of jobs available.
UPDATE: 16th December 2008
This week, they have updated the numbers again, and it's not good, jobs available online now down to just over 127,539, that's 4,000 jobs in a week, or about 3.5% reduction, not good at all
