FactCheck: Are there any jobs out there?
The claim
“There are jobs out there, with Jobcentre Plus taking on 10,000 vacancies every working day.”
Spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), 14 November 2011
The background
The grim news that a “slow, painful contraction” is expected in the jobs market was met with defiance by the DWP.
“We always said that the road to recovery would be tough – there is a long way to go until before we deal with all the economic challenges ahead particularly given the crisis in the eurozone,” a spokesman said.
The problem is, said the department, the message isn’t getting through that despite the gloom, there are jobs out there. In fact, there are 10,000 new jobs advertised every day at the Jobcentre, they insisted.
Are they right – is there a silver lining amid the gloom? FactCheck investigates.
The analysis
The average number of Jobcentre Plus vacancies over the last year is about 325,000 a month – or 75,000 a week – which is where the DWP gets the 10,000 figure from. But let’s put that into context.
Fewer jobs
Jobcentre vacancies currently make up 70 per cent of all jobs on the market.
Overall, there were 462,000 jobs up for grabs between July and September. That is almost a third less than the 604,000 jobs going during the same period in 2008.
So there are far fewer jobs on the market – and in the last quarter the number of available jobs climbed just 0.2 per cent, according to latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.
But we’re not quite at the point we were during the financial crisis – when the freeze on hiring whittled down the number of available jobs to as few as 424,000 between May and July in 2009.
More job hunters
At the moment, there’s one vacant job for every 5.6 people looking – almost triple the number of people per job that there were ten years ago.
Between 2001 and 2008 the number of people searching versus the number of jobs available was largely stable – ranging between 2.2 and 2.9 people per job. The market was at its worst in January 2010, when there were 8.5 people for each vacancy (see graph below).
Sector-wide slowdown
An industry breakdown by the Office for National Statistics shows that the number of vacancies has flatlined across the board. The majority of industries have seen zero per cent growth in vacancies per 100 jobs in the past year – with the sole exception of the mining and quarrying industry which has seen a 1.3 per cent rise year on year.
Full time vs part time
According to the DWP, of all the Jobcentre jobs advertised in September this year, 88,251 were part time and the remaining 257,791 were full time positions. In the last year, just under 75 per cent of new vacancies have been for full-time jobs.
The verdict
The DWP is right to point out there are new jobs advertised every day, but as the graph shows the gloom is well founded. There are more people vying for fewer jobs in a market where jobs growth has flatlined.
At the height of the financial crisis in 2009, as a big freeze on hiring swept the country, there were eight unemployed people per vacancy. That’s four times the number of people per job than pre-crisis.
Until last November, that number was on a steady path south on the road to recovery.
But in November, the same month the Spending Review was announced, it stalled, and indeed went into reverse.
By Emma Thelwell
There are 21 comments on this post
It would be interesting to know the average number of weekly hours for those jobs – e.g. are they full time or part time? If someone takes on part time work, they could theoretically fill two or more vacancies – similarly, if a full time job is filled by two or more part timers, then that will count as two jobs rather than one.
But I suspect no-one counts up the FTE of jobs on offer or the number of hours worked by newly-employed.
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Hi there – FactCheck here. In answer to your question, in September there were 257,791 full time jobs and 88,251 part-time advertised. I’ll add it into the blog. Thanks, Emma
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At the moment, there’s one vacant job for every 5.6 people looking – almost triple the number of people per job that there were ten years ago.. And employers are having to really decide who gets in.. If you have a employment gap, you are pushed to the back,or they find a reason to reject a person.. this is what the unemployed are getting. But this is a national figure.. not local, In and around liverpool more people are going for the jobs, It would be interesting for them to look at the local job areas rather than national..
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It’s the same in Northern Ireland. We have a heavily bloated public sector, and the government’s response is to let the private sector sort it out. It seems to have conveniently slipped the Tories’ minds that public relies on private sector work.
I’ve finished university with a planning degree, and I’m only able to keep applying for work because I had been forced to do admin work for my dad during my summer holidays. Not only are there too few jobs, there’s no courses on interview tips or effort to help build confidence.
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One thing that always irritated me when looking for work was often agencies would advertise generic vacancies that did not in fact exist. They hit targets for a certain number of people registered, and to do this, often repeat job descriptions to deliver these results. This then leads to falsification of job vacancies available to seekers.
There is also the issue of zero hour contracts to be considered. Many organisations, usually catering or factory industries, advertise work on zero hour contracts which means employees can be out of work for weeks at a time due to insufficient work available. People get wise to this and avoid these vacancies. This therefore is not a vacancy per se, but a role where someone is not guaranteed an income. Not many of us can live on zero hours a week.
It’s a vague statement to assert there are a certain number of vacancies and a certain number of job seekers. As a result, while fact checking of the direct figures assists in clarifying the situation, it does not exactly identify a much wider and more complex picture.
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That’s a good point, I’ve seen jobs advertised by supermarkets that only offer 3.5hrs per week. I wondered how widespread this is.
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Not to mention the tens of thousands of sick & disabled people who are having their benefits cut & told to look for work. Disabled people have a difficult enough time finding work when the economy is good: who in today’s climate is going to hire someone who needs workplace modifications or different duties when they can choose an able-bodied person to do the job?
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Employers now can be very choosy about who they want to hire because there are so many people going for the jobs. Or long term unemployed, or I am on the edge of being sick, osteo arthritis of both ankles. I mentioned this once to the job centre and they said we have a disabled person working here.. Just One.. and that proves they like other employers.
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It would be interesting to note how many higher paid positions have been replaced with ‘min-wage’, part-time and internship positions…
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Is it possible for fact check to look a little closer and consider how many of the 10,000 are temporary or based on the hard to fathom 0 hours contract? Plus it seems there are blatant abuses, radio 4 covered a story recently about people being ripped off by con artist using the system to make contact with the desperate willing to pay to get employed – can anyone upload jobs onto the jobcentre website? What checks are done?
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I live in surrey and became Unemployed in November 2010, when i signed on at the job centre the advisor told me that most of the help that the previous Labour Government had introduced was being taken away.
Most of the companies I make an application to fail to reply, i have had job interview and some dont even reply to it.
Most sign on days the advisors tell me it is similar everywhere, most of the jobless clients they see tell them that employers dont reply to applications and it makes it hard to prove you are making the effort.
I am approaching 40 not yet over the hill but i want to get back into regular work and not tempry although i would take tempory work but shops in my area are overwhelmed with applicants.
My last interview was for a Pharmacutical company i was told they had over 200 applications for 1 job ( giving me a 0.5% chance of being successful)
i also heard today that some companies who need staff are not recruiting as they dont know how the future is going to fan out.
With the government cutting everything and taxing people to the hilt it is going to get much much workse before it gets better
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There is one job out there for every 5.6 people looking…so although it might be fact that there are jobs out there (for 1 in 5.6) it’s fiction that there are enough to go round, i.e. that this is a satisfactory situation. And of course it is set to get worse. Raising the retirement age means that those jobs won’t be released as soon for younger people coming along so the pool of unemployed will increase even if no further jobs are lost.
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Where I am there are hardly any jobs at all going, and the ones that are tend to be telesales which is hard to stick at because they are always getting rid of people and taking new people on also something needs to be done about these ‘apprenticeships’ I think that these days employers will advertise an apprenticeship for something as simple as working in a coffee shop or clothes shop and pay you less than half the NMW and it’s disgusting.
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The fact that both vacancies and unemployment are increasing is actually more worrying than it is good news. Fairly basic labour economics tells us that there’s a negative relationship between unemployment and vacancies and that if both are increasing then there is a possibility that long-term unemployment is on the rise. The DWP telling us that more vacancies in the economy implies a healthy labour market is disingenuous at best. If the labour market were healthy or improving those vacancies would be filled.
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Also to be taken into account is the hard-line approach the conservatives have forced onto Jobcentre staff; where many people who were claiming JSA due to depression etc not making work possible now being forced back into work prematurely, or face a situation where they have no financial support from the government whatsoever.
So there are many more unemployed than the graph would suggest at the moment, but due to the new criteria of ‘able to work’ are unable to be counted through JSA and IB figures.
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So there are 375,000 jobs a year.. How many of those are repeat jobs. Many times i have seenJobs that last 1 month, upto 3 months, then i see it advertised again the month later. Are they counted as well. The more i think about these figures the more i question them.
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Running some queries on the Jobcentre Mirror database at 19:30 I find 7183 vacancies posted today, a ‘typical’ Monday. Of these 201 were internal notifications, and 2030 were temporary.
Jobs posted through Jobcentre Plus are vetted to a certain extent and are probably more believable that those found in other locations. That having been written, some are glaring place-holders (http://zois.com/CGI/50531 as an example).
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[...] Four’s Fact Check decided to have a look at the state of the nation’s jobs. Apparently there are a host of jobs advertised every day, although Fact Check provides the detail [...]
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Cathy/Emma,
It’s silly to do this where neocon Britain is concerned – but let’s take these figures at their face value.
The annual average number of vacancies is 325,000.
The number of unemployed in neocon Britain is 2,570,000.
So…let me see…2,570,000 minus 325,000 leaves only 2,245,000 more jobs to find.
So that’s alright, then. Or something.
Well done you neocon capitalists.
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It would be nice to know, What percentage of these jobs were taken up by ‘agency’ labour? As opposed to people off the street or job centre.
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Hi Emma Thelwell,
Could you please provide a breakdown by region as to where all these jobs were located?
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