Job market challenges: Redundancies and ghosting frustrate job seekers

Seek said Auckland job ads were up 3% but the job market still faces challenges. Photo / 123rf

• Allister Benson has experienced three redundancies in 24 months and has applyied for 500 jobs in a year.
• Seek data shows a 1% monthly increase in job ads, with Auckland up 3% and retail demand rising 10%.
• Seek’s Rob Clark notes a modest job market improvement, with cautious optimism for the year’s second half.

By Susan Edmunds of RNZ

Allister Benson has been made redundant three times in the past 24 months and says it’s tough going in the job market at the moment.

He estimates he’s applied for up to 500 jobs in the past 12 months.

He had been working in tech sales for about 15 years but said he had broadened his search as he looked for a new role.

“Tech has proved to be quite unstable, it’s often the first to boom and the first to drop so I’ve looked all over the shop, in multiple different industries.”

He said he left his last role just over two months ago.

Benson said while there were some signs of life in the job market, there were also false starts.

“There’s a company I won’t name – they literally said we have to advertise our jobs but this job is already filled.”

It was common to be “ghosted” with no reply to an application, he said.

“When I was made redundant last year it was a case where I was looking at as many jobs as I could get my hands on, it was a bit of a scattergun approach because I was a bit more stressed about everything.”

He said being made redundant so frequently was tough: “It provides a very unstable family environment.”

Benson is now working on a voluntary basis as a career coach and says he expects things to improve over the rest of this year – geopolitical upheaval notwithstanding.

New data from Seek indicates he might be right.

Its figures show that the number of jobs advertised was up 1% month-on-month on a seasonally adjusted basis in April.

Ad numbers remain down 10% year-on-year, although this is the slowest rate of decline since 2022.

Seek said Auckland job ads were up 3%, Waikato 4% and Manawatū 10%.

There was a 10% jump in demand for retail and consumer products workers.

Despite redundancies still being prominent nationally, the number of jobs advertised was up 1% month-on-month on a seasonally adjusted basis in April.

The number of applications per job ad dropped 3% from March, the first fall since November, although numbers still remain near record highs.

Seek NZ country manager Rob Clark said the data showed a modest but noteworthy improvement in the employment market after a sustained period of decline.

“We actually saw a positive increase across the majority of the industry sectors that we measure which is really encouraging. So we saw retail up 10%, which is quite significant because that’s a big sector, sales up 8% and information communication technology up 7%, which is encouraging because that’s had quite a torrid time of it over the past couple of years.”

Healthcare and medical was down 3% month-on-month and 20% year-on-year. Engineering was down 25% on a year earlier.

Clark said things could improve for the job market towards the end of the year.

“I don’t think anyone’s predicting a meteoric change upward, but people are cautiously optimistic that that it will be a better second half of the year.”

Candidates who stood out were those who did a good job of matching their skills to those required by a job, along with providing examples of how they had demonstrated those abilities, he said.

Another applicant, Sharon Hunter, said she had seen a small increase in the number of jobs advertised, but there also seemed to be more people looking for work.

“Application numbers for that small percentage rise in available jobs appears to have risen – I am basing this on responses from recruiters – both external and in-house – who often provide the number of applicants in ‘thank you but no thank you’ letters.

“I often receive letters which say we got 150 applicants for X role. Pre-Covid it was a snip to get a role. I often ended up with two or three options . I couldn’t grab a break between contracts.”

She said it was common to be treated poorly. She recently received a templated form rejection that did not even have her name or the role she had applied for filled in.

Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment data showed in the year to March there was a 21.7% fall in the number of advertised job vacancies, a smaller drop than the 27.2% fall in the year to December.

However, job ads had been declining each quarter since December 2022 by its measure.