The HR job market has hit rock bottom and hiring should resume by the end of the summer, a review of online recruitment asserts.
The Monster Employment Index found that HR recruitment had stabilised, with June seeing a one point increase to 57 (where the baseline is 100) in the number of job vacancies advertised online.
The number of jobs advertised across all sectors in the same month increased by 1%, but was still down 38% on June 2008.
Hugo Sellert, head of economic research at Monster Worldwide, told Personnel Today: “Recruitment in the sector has stabilised but it has not started to recover yet. It has reached the point where many companies that needed to institute a hiring freeze have done so, so it has bottomed out now.
“I expect companies to start hiring HR people again at the end of the summer, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty. We will start to see more favourable conditions for HR, but it will be slow progress.”
Meanwhile, online advertising for jobs in London increased by 3%, which Sellert said indicated the start of a turning point.
He said: “The two-month increase in advertising in London is a positive thing and shows a bit of a turning point.”
The report also found demand for healthcare and social workers had increased by 71% in the year to June, while demand for teachers had increased by 44% – but Sellert insisted this was not the indication of market recovery it might appear to be.
He said the increase was due to continued shortages in these areas and the increased use of online advertising in the public sector to cut costs.
“The upturn in these sectors underscores the reported shortages of teachers and healthcare workers,” he said. “These shortages for certain specialised skills, combined with the increased utilisation of online recruiting, has led to the increase in online vacancies.”
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He added that when positions are hard to fill the adverts stay online longer and are re-posted on multiple websites, distorting the results.
The report also showed that construction vacancies had fallen by 5%, but Sellert said the reduction was exaggerated because the abundance of construction workers looking for jobs meant companies often did not need to use online recruitment.
