In short:
ANZ is warning the labour market is poised to deteriorate sharply.
Recruiters are reporting hundreds of applications for individual roles.
What’s next?
The RBA will have to sort through the evidence on unemployment before its next meeting in August.
While the jobless rate has been slowly creeping higher, alarm bells are ringing about the potential for a big surge in unemployment.
When Sydney-based account manager Michael (not his real name) lost his job in August last year, aged in his 40s, he began to look for work immediately.
“I was going through LinkedIn, Seek, looking for jobs,” he told PM.
“I even hired a job consultant.
“I spent over $1,000 for them to put together my resume, give me a cover letter.
“I paid them a bit extra to give me tailored [material] for a very specific job I went for.
“I didn’t get an interview for that job … in fact, I didn’t even get a response from the recruiter.”
Michael has recently landed more work, but it has meant taking a huge pay cut.
“So I actually put out a call on LinkedIn to my network and said, you know ‘most jobs come through networks, guys, I need your help,'” he said.
“And a friend came to me and basically said I have a job, it’s yours if you want it.
“But it was a job that was designed for somebody only a couple of years out of university … and it was the same salary as I earned 25 years ago.”
Few roles, many applicants
A director at recruiter Robert Half, Nicole Gorton, told PM many more students, migrants and returning ex-pats are entering an already well-supplied labour market.
It’s made the job hunt highly competitive, and Ms Gorton said their agency is now receiving hundreds of applications for each individual job opening.
“We can shortlist from 200 down to three,” she said.
“Our job really is to do that short-listing on behalf of an organisation … and a lot of those are not appropriate.
“A lot of them don’t have visas to work here … they can be from abroad … and maybe they do have the visa to work here and they don’t have the technical skills and / or the level of experience that is required for the job.”
And, Ms Gorton warned, many firms were prioritising internal candidates to fill roles.
“Companies are trying to promote internally, upskill internally, as a retention strategy,” she said.
“So we are seeing that that is first and foremost, before they go to market, so to speak.”
ANZ senior economist Blair Chapman warned the unemployment rate could soon rise rapidly.
Crucially, Dr Chapman was not expecting mass sackings — rather, an influx of job seekers without enough available roles.
“So they can enter and they tend to enter the [labour market] into unemployment rather than into employment,” he told PM.
“We’ve already seen that sort of share of people who are entering and ending up in unemployment increasing a little this year.
“And we can see that the rate of job finding can really drop quickly.”
Dr Chapman warned there was a risk Australia’s unemployment rate could peak above 5 per cent, which is well above current forecasts, by the end of next year.
Jobless rate acceleration a matter of time
The obvious question then is, why does official unemployment data show a jobless rate at 4.1 per cent in June, which the ABS describes as “relatively tight”?
University of Canberra economist Leonora Risse said anecdotal evidence of harder and longer job searches often preceded higher unemployment.
“What you’re describing is the movement from 4 per cent unemployment rate to 4.1 per cent, and perhaps the longer amount of time it’s taking for people to find a job,” she told PM.
“There could be more search effort involved.
“Unemployment is about workers being matched to jobs that fit them.
“And so eventually, ideally, they’ll find that job match but in the process of doing so there’s that time in between, absolutely — what we call search time and search cost.”
The “cost” for Michael is plain to see.
“I feel abandoned by society — especially as I hear on the news about how unemployment is so low and everyone who wants a job can get one,” he said.
“I’m over-qualified. I’m older than the people they are hiring.
“I’m not necessarily ticking the boxes they want. The things that I have don’t seem to be valued.
“I really don’t know how to process it.”
The Reserve Bank also has to process the official data and the anecdotal evidence through its liaison program before it makes its next interest rates decision in early August.
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