BNZ/SEEK Employment Report: Deconstructing

BNZ note that "far from being an aberration, the 8.3% drop in November’s job ads proved to be a pretty good pointer to further weakness in December. Job ads fell 6.3% in the final month of 2022. This took the cumulative fall over the last four months to around 20%, based on the seasonally adjusted series. It’s been a similar sized drop in trend terms. This measure also marked jobs ads, in December 2022, at about 20% above their 2019 average, whereas in mid-2022 they were running around 40% higher than that pre-COVID point of reference. It’s been quite the cooling. Indeed, tracking the trend forward, jobs ads could be back down to pre-COVID levels by the middle of 2023."