The fading relevance of the ANZ Bank’s job ads series has again been illustrated with the March report released on Monday showing job vacancies are continuing to fall. They aren’t but it has been a story the ANZ series has been claiming for six months or more, and yet that fall is directly contradicted by the quarterly job vacancies data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Business Insider claimed job vacancies were falling at the fastest rate in five years, which is not the case at all – job vacancies continue to rise. In fact the ABS showed job ads in the three months to February rose to an all time high of 244,900, up 1.1% in the quarter and 9.2% over the year.
The ANZ report said Australian Job Advertisements fell 1.7% in March, to be down 6% over the year at 166,509. The difference between the two readings is more than 77,000 (or over 40% of the ANZ total) which is a serious discrepancy.
Now for the first time, the ANZ itself has started publicly questioning the story its own survey is showing.
“The signal coming from ANZ Job Ads is in complete contrast to that coming from job vacancies, which continue to reach record highs,” according to David Plank, Head of Australian Economics at the ANZ.
“We think the divergence may reflect changes in the way firms search for employees, with more possibly directing job seekers to their own websites rather than advertising broadly for every position…If this is the case, then the divergence reflects a structural shift in ANZ Job Ads rather than signalling a weaker job market. Recent strength in business conditions and job vacancies suggest that the labour market will remain resilient despite weaker job ads….“If this is the case, then the divergence reflects a structural shift in ANZ Job Ads rather than signalling a weaker job market.”
That is in fact the point made by Guy Debelle, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank in a speech on the labour market last October where he pointed out:
“…the divergence between vacancies and job advertisements (as a share of the labour force) has been steadily increasing over recent years. This in part reflects changes in the way that businesses recruit and workers search for jobs. For example, the job advertisements data capture the main online recruitment websites, but they are not picking up newer recruitment sites or the use of social media sites, such as LinkedIn, so the usefulness of this series may be declining. Large corporations are also maintaining ‘expression of interest’ registers on their own websites, which reduces their need to advertise to fill a vacancy.”
The ANZ job ads survey started to track vacancies advertised in newspapers (the so-called rivers of gold advertising) that fried up a decade ago as websites and online services took over. In fact the ANZ job ads series eventually dropped the separation of ads into newspapers and the internet years ago (partly because the number of job ads in the newspapers were so low, underlining their irrelevance).
Now the relevance of the ANZ job ads survey is being challenged by changes online – which have been around for a decade (such as LinkedIn). Could the survey itself be a ‘cost saving’ at the ANZ with the ABS series remaining in place because of its greatest accuracy?
