The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released jobs vacancy data for the three months to February, which shows that total job vacancies fell by 6.1% from November 2023.
It was the seventh quarterly drop in a row, and job vacancies are now 23.5% lower than they were at their peak in May 2022.
Separate data from Seek shows that job vacancies have fallen back to around their pre-pandemic levels, while the number of applicants per job has exploded, reflecting the combination of reduced labour demand from employers (job ads) and the massive increase in labour supply (mostly via net overseas migration:
The number of applicants per job paints a very different picture of the Australian labour market than the official ABS unemployment rate of 3.7%:
Australia’s jobs market is much weaker than reported in the official ABS data.
