It should now be easier to recruit people, apparently ...

[Newshound]

We keep seeing regurgitated reports such as this one suggesting that employers should take heart from the fact that Seek’s Employment Index fell in January.

Frankly we don’t see the significance of this because Seek’s figures are based upon the number of jobs listed on their own job board. The problem here is that there are thousands of repeated and cross posted job ads on Seek and the people who place those ads are typically commercial recruitment consultants. If there’s one time of the year that many recruiters take some time off, it’s January. So if the people who post a disproportionate number of the job ads on Seek stop advertising for a couple of weeks, of course we’re going to see a marked decrease in the numbers.

There is also evidence that recruiters are looking for different avenues other than the big broad brush job boards to attract the people they need, this also could have an effect on Seek’s numbers without there being any real drop in demand.

Of course we could be completely wrong and Seek may have done much work to normalize their numbers, so if your trying to hire people and you have noticed that it has suddenly become a lot easier do so, please let us know by adding your comments to this article.