Marc Privett, Head of Product and Customer Insights at Careers24 reveals the job market trends that are currently defining the South African job market.

Young educated job seekers currently hold the cards when it comes to employer selection, in spite of a tight job market. This is what our 3rd quarter stats have revealed.

“The activity on our platform clearly shows that young, educated and upwardly mobile job seekers are doing more and more research on the companies they want to work for. In fact, one of the more popular employers was viewed more than 150,000 times in the last quarter. If anything, this shows that the market is slowly changing to one where new job seekers would rather work for a company which suits them,” says Marc Privett, Head of Product and Customer Insights at Careers24.

According to our stats, the most active job seeker is either male or female (the gender split is very even), is most likely to be a black South African (65%), living in Gauteng (45%), with a tertiary qualification (59%), and is between the age of 21 – 30 (60%). 

Another notable trend highlighted by the stats is that the 3rd quarter of 2017 was an industrious one, as is traditionally the case. Jobs were viewed a total of 8,2 million times on Careers24 within the quarter and the site signed up more than 100,000 new job seekers. However, only slightly more than 70,000 new jobs were listed during the same period, showing that the demand for jobs still outnumbers the available jobs. 

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This decline is in line with Statistics South Africa’s findings in their Q2 Quarterly Employment Survey. The survey results show a decline of 34,000 jobs (or -0.4%) to 9,617,000 for the 2nd quarter of 2017, specifically in the formal non-agricultural sector.

On the recruitment side, when comparing 2016 and 2017’s most in-demand sectors (those with more than 1000 jobs posted on a monthly basis), a few trends were noteworthy. IT remained the number one field in terms of available jobs, while engineers continue to be in high-demand.

Certain sectors showed promising growth in terms of job posts with Finance and Academics showing a 57% and 54% growth respectively. Below are the 10 sectors that showed the most growth compared to the same time last year:

Finance - 57%

Academic - 54%

Call Centre - 41%

Management - 41%

Health Fitness & Beauty - 37%

Sales - 34%

Marketing - 32%

Procurement - 30%

Graduate - 28%

Media - 27%

The data is based on usage patterns of both recruiters sourcing candidates and candidates who apply for positions on the platform. 

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Original article: Bizcommunity.com