Online job advert volumes (2022)

[This is a archive post, previously released on LinkedIn]

A nice dataset is available from the ONS & Adzuna on online job advert volumes (source). It comes with lots of caveats and should really be put in the context of vacancy surveys and business counts, etc. Nevertheless, I’ve created a graph showing trends for the English regions. Three interesting observations:

1) Overall, the post-pandemic recovery of online job ads bucked a pre-pandemic downwards trend by stabilising between May 2021 and May 2022.

2) Note the clear divergence between regions after the pandemic, compared with prior. Interpretation is difficult without knowing more about the data collection methodology, but it’s almost certainly something to do with remote working: observe how London was the slowest region to return to the 100 index point. (Note that the tight regional grouping before Feb 2020 is partly an artefact of indexing. The overall downwards trend since 2018, however is clear.)

3) All regions have undergone a pretty much linear decline in online job ads since about May 2022. The table above shows a quantified summary. The deterioration has stabilised in recent weeks (possibly seasonal). The UK’s economic outlook isn’t looking promising, but we’ll see where it goes from here…