Press Releases

19/10/2011
The IrishJobs.ie Online Jobs Index reveals a 10% fall in the number of jobs advertised online in Q3 2011.

10% fall in the number of jobs advertised on line in Q3 of 2011

IrishJobs.ie Jobs Index Q3 2011 presented by economist Stephen Kinsella reveals:

· Total number of jobs advertised online are up year on year although figures have fallen by 10 per cent in third quarter this year compared with the previous quarter
· Drop in the number of jobs advertised online for Security (-48 per cent) and Marketing (-22 per cent) in Q3 2011 compared with Q2 2011
· Marked improvement in Q3 2011 for General Management (+38 per cent), HR (+53 per cent), Sales (+28 per cent), and Telecoms (+42 per cent) compared with Q3 2010

Ireland, Monday October 17th 2011: The IrishJobs.ie Jobs Index for the third quarter 2011 reveals that the total number of jobs advertised online is down from the previous quarter by almost 10 per cent.

Worst affected sectors include Call Centres (-7 per cent), Marketing (-22 per cent), and Security, Trades and General Services (-48 per cent), perhaps due to seasonal changes in demand for labour. However the number of jobs advertised online are up year on year in Q3 2011 compared with Q3 2010. The Jobs Index measures jobs advertised online across the main recruitment websites in Ireland.

Construction continues its long term decline (-23 per cent) in addition to Security, Trades and General Services. The service sectors encountered a quelling of the revival seen in the report of the last quarter, arguing for a seasonal shift in the types of jobs being made available, according to Dr Stephen Kinsella, author of report.

Dr Stephen Kinsella, comments: “Although the figures are down for new job vacancies, compared with the same quarter last year, things are looking a bit better for the Irish labour market. Across the main jobs sectors, the Jobs Index tells us that the picture is improved overall signaling a rebound in certain sectors.”

Changes evident from the same quarter last year, which are a better measure of the health of the labour market, and less prone to seasonal issues, show a marked improvement in General Management (+38 per cent), HR (+53 per cent), Sales (+28 per cent), and Telecoms (+42 per cent). The difference from the depths of the recession, the second quarter of 2009, is pronounced. At the close of 2010 into the first and second quarters of this year there was an upward trend with online job vacancies growing steadily.

The IrishJobs.ie report is based on company advertisements from July to September 2011. The number of new jobs for this period (versus replacement jobs) is 78 per cent showing real growth in the economy.

Spotlight: Waterford – where to now?
Recent months have seen Waterford in the headlines as major employers moved away from the area. The IrishJobs.ie report looks at the jobs available in Waterford by job type, but also in surrounding counties. Clearly IT, sales, science, and pharmaceuticals are all in demand, whilst construction, customer service, and banking jobs are not in such high demand. Future reports will return to this area.

Spotlight: Call Centres
The call centre industry has been in the news recently, much of the news being negative. The data shows that call centre jobs have been plentiful throughout the crisis, with demand for new jobs only recently dropping off.

Salary Expectations
IrishJobs.ie Jobs Indices for Q1 and Q2 this year uncovered a striking trend in relation to salary expectations. The Q2 2011 report revealed that younger workers seem to be expecting more than older workers and this coincided with the findings in Q1 2011 which showed an increase in salary expectations by an average of 3000 euro relative to the first quarter last year.

Stephen Kinsella is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Limerick. He is the author of Ireland in 2050: How we will be Living and Understanding Ireland’s Economic Crisis: Prospects for Recovery. His research spans the area of computable economics, health economics, and experimental economics.

Quarter 2, 2009 is the reference month for the IrishJobs.ie Jobs Index.

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About the IrishJobs.ie Index
The IrishJobs.ie jobs index monitors live and current jobs advertised by companies across the main recruitment websites in Ireland, IrishJobs.ie and Jobs.ie, on a weekly basis, thereby providing a broad and comprehensive overview of the Irish market. Data from April 2009 provides the benchmark for the Index. The IrishJobs.ie Jobs Index measures not only the number of jobs available but also how individual sectors and counties are performing. In effect, it can give a yearly snapshot of the economy.

About IrishJobs.ie
IrishJobs.ie is an award winning website with ISO and W-Mark web certification. IrishJobs.ie currently advertises over 16,000 job vacancies sourced from nearly 1,000 active clients. According to the latest ABCe audit figures (January 2008), IrishJobs.ie has 10,753,187 page impressions, from 963,397 visits to the site by over 526,000 different jobseekers per month.

About saongroup.com
saongroup.com is one of the fastest growing online recruitment companies in the world with operations in Ireland, the UK, Europe, the USA, China, South Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. The group also includes Candidate Manager, a leading global provider of recruitment management software.