It is still unclear as to whether or not the globe is experiencing a worsening economic situation. We at Careersaas decided to use our open job role data as a potential indicator of the future economic climate. Careersaas is a job search engine, that not only specializes in helping users find remote positions, but also has tools that scan the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to find employment opportunities from all over the world.
The job market currently paints an interesting picture. The COVID-19 years saw companies invest heavily in new staff, particularly technology and Internet companies, with thousands of new positions being created to handle with the new demand for at-home work, online shopping and delivery, and other hobbies such as online gaming, communities and conferencing.
The threat of a recession continues to loom, and seemingly there is still one indicator that really prevents the world from sinking into economic crisis; the solid labour market. Careersaas’ indicators seem to suggest that the situation is not quite as rosy as is being communicated by administrative organizations in the United States, such as the Fed. Let’s take a look.
Careersaas indexes jobs from over 30 applicant tracking systems (ATS), which we use to help us find jobs from close to 1 million companies. We picked a couple of ATS boards to assess how the situation looks from 2019 to today, spring 2023.
This above image is a graph displaying open job positions extracted from a well known job board known as BambooHR. Towards the “end” of the pandemic in early to mid 2022, open job roles appear to have tapered off, but has not yet returned to the lows of mid-2019. When our team began trying to make sense our data, the first and most obvious observation was that throughout the coronavirus pandemic, more and more jobs were being posted online. This began to reach a peak during April or May of 2022, through to the end of July 2022, when we suddenly notice a continuous and gradual drop off in open, published job roles.
The trend is almost the same for ICIMS as it is for BambooHR, except that we see a more prominent data spike into the spring of 2022, and a similarly significant drop around July or August 2022. This also coincides with when we began to see companies begin layoffs, and this analysis can also be supported with data from the Layoffs.fyi site and presented in the image below. Layoffs.fyi is a site that tracks companies that report staff being laid off, with a focus on the tech industry.
Much the same as the data we see in the Careersaas application, Layoffs.fyi data suggests that the situation began to look gloomy around May 2022 through to August 2022. Concerningly, November 2022 saw a spike once more, before reaching another peak in January 2023.
What does this mean for the remainder of 2023?
While Careersaas cannot predict the future, economists and speculators appear to have diverging opinions on the future situation. Some suggest that a long recession is on the way, and some investors seem to suggest that the market has bottomed already, and recovery is on track.
What we can see is that in almost 75% of our data retrieved from ATS boards, companies have reopened hiring again in February through to March 2023 and have started posting more open job positions.
We believe that this is a sign that some companies think that the worst could be over. Many firms have taken an opportunity to downsize their teams, reducing their overheads as they prepare for what some say is an incoming recession. This process took close to two quarters. Now teams are posting positions once more. Careersaas’ team has observed that there are now new job posts in recent weeks, particularly for positions in sales, engineering, design and PR. There has been a most noticeable uptick for role postings in software engineering. Our analysis also indicates that for those companies that are trying to bring their team back to the office, these same firms are also posting less open roles. Companies that are more open to Remote work appear to be posting more jobs than usual.
It will be necessary to keep a close eye on the job market over the next month or two to better predcit what will happen next and when, and Careersaas will make a similar analysis closer to the summer of 2023.
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