The recruitment market is not (yet) for turning
2018 was a bumper year for Northern Ireland’s labour market which was littered with a series of multi-year and record highs of the positive variety.
The fourth quarter saw the Quarterly Employment Survey notch up its twelfth successive quarterly rise in job numbers. This took the overall total number of employee jobs to 773,750 — its eleventh consecutive quarter of record highs. The strengthening labour market was broad-based with the private sector and service sector posting all-time highs.
Meanwhile, construction and manufacturing employment hit their highest levels in over 8-years and 15-years respectively.
Key Highlights for the job market in Q1 2019
– Advertised vacancies hit a fresh record high in Q1 rising by 13% y/y. Overall listings have risen by over one-third (36%) in 4 years.
– IT remains the sector advertising the most vacancies
– The number of IT vacancies in Q1 remained close to its record high and accounts for 13% of all listings
– After IT, the Social, Charity & Not for Profit, Hospitality, Engineering and Accountancy sectors posted the largest number of job vacancies
– Twenty-one of the thirty-two employment categories recorded growth in job listings relative to the same quarter last year
– Five of the 32 employment categories hit record highs with a sixth category recording a joint-record high
– Record highs were recorded in the following categories:
o Secretarial and Admin
o Security, Trades & General Services
o Big Data & Analytics
o Marketing
o Social, Charity & Not for Profit
o HR (matched its previous record high)
– The Nursing, Healthcare & Medical category recorded its fourth successive quarterly fall in vacancies. Indeed, listings in this category fell to a new low. It was a similar story for the Banking, Financial Services & Insurance category with vacancies falling sharply (56% y/y) to a new series low.
– Demand from employers remained very strong and close to record highs in Construction, Architecture & Property; Production, Manufacturing & Materials; Accountancy & Finance; Motoring and Legal. Sales occupations also had a strong quarter and reported their highest number of job listings in two years.
– The top three categories account for 30% of all listings with the top six categories accounting for half of all job listings.
– Social, Charity and Not For Profit organisations have witnessed a 61% y/y surge in advertised vacancies. Listings in Q1 accounted for over 9% of all advertised posts and the second highest number of vacancies across all employment categories. This is likely to reflect recruiting for existing jobs (i.e. staff replacement) rather than a significant expansion in headcount within the sector.
Potential challenges for recruiters
Skills shortages also became increasingly evident within the Northern Ireland labour market in 2018. With unemployment close to record lows hiring and retaining staff remains a challenge as we progress through 2019. Indeed, demand for both new and replacement staff remained strong in Q1 as exemplified in the latest NIJobs Report with a record number of job listings.
It should be remembered that a rising number of vacancies includes churn within the labour market and doesn’t just represent new jobs. So a sector posting a large number of advertised posts could be a sector experiencing a high degree of staff turnover as opposed to a sector reporting significant employment growth.
There are already signs that the economy is cooling in Q1 2019 with ongoing Brexit uncertainty acting as a major headwind. As a result, Northern Ireland’s recent eleven quarter run of record job numbers could come unstuck later this year.
Richard Ramsey is Chief Economist, Northern Ireland, at Ulster Bank. In addition to providing regular analysis internally at the bank, Richard is a frequent economic commentator in the media and a regular columnist in newspapers Northern Ireland. You can read more from Richard on his blog Ulster Economix.