Australia Job Market: Are Australian employers hiring new employees?

47% of employers were recruiting last month, a decrease of 1 percentage point, with recruitment activity stronger in regional areas (51%), compared with 45% of employers in capital cities. The recruitment rate in capital cities declined over the month by 4 percentage points, while it increased by the same amount in regional areas. This is the latest job market scenario in Australia from the ‘Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey (REOS) Insights Report’ for May 2024.

Jobs and Skills Australia surveys at least 1,000 employers each month to find out about their experience when recruiting staff as well as whether they are expecting to increase staffing levels.

Recruitment activity and future staffing expectations both declined over the month to May 2024. While the recruitment difficulty rate rose in May, it still remains well below levels recorded a year ago.

In smoothed terms, the recruitment rate has been slightly declining since the start of the year. In recent months, the smoothed recruitment difficulty rate has remained relatively steady, however, results over the coming months will confirm underlying trends.

Recruitment activity eased by 1 percentage point over the month, to 47% of employers in May 2024. This is 4 percentage points less than in May 2023 and 12 percentage points lower than the record high of 59% in mid-2022.

In Capital Cities, 45% of employers were recruiting, 4 percentage points lower than a month ago and also 4 percentage points lower than a year ago.

The recruitment rate in the Rest of State areas (which typically covers regional Australia) increased by 4 percentage points over the month to 51% of employers. Despite this increase, it remains 4 percentage points lower than a year ago.

While the proportion of recruiting employers experiencing recruitment difficulty rose by 3 percentage points to 56%, it still remains 11 percentage points below the 67% recorded a year ago.

In May, employers were slightly less optimistic about future staffing levels, with the proportion of employers expecting to increase staff numbers in the next three months easing by 1 percentage point to 19%.

These findings are generally consistent with other labour market indicators, such as Job and Skills Australia’s Internet Vacancy Index, which also point to an easing labour market.

Australia Vacancy Report May 2024

Online job ads increased slightly last month, up by 0.2% or 420 in seasonally adjusted terms, according to the Internet Vacancy Index (IVI).

Though job vacancies remain about 40% higher than in 2019, the last substantial monthly increase was more than 12 months ago.

The Nowcast of Employment by Region and Occupation, or NERO, has been developed using an emerging methodology called nowcasting which uses traditional, real-time and big data techniques to estimate trends in a timely fashion.

NERO provides data on the current employment in occupations in each region, every month. For example, the most recent data shows that Australia has more than 200,000 accountants and some of the fastest-growing regional centres for accountants are Geelong, the Sunshine Coast, and New England and North West NSW.