Job vacancies up 40% year on year

JOB availability improved to its best level for two years last month, with the number of vacancies rising by 40% year on year and by 26% on August’s level.

Latest monthly employment data from the Irish office of international recruitment specialist, Morgan McKinley shows that September’s activity resulted in the highest volume of new professional job vacancies since October 2008 — although levels were still well below what was generally seen at the height of the boom cycle in 2007.

“September is typically one of the busiest months for jobseekers as the holiday season comes to an end and both candidates and hiring managers are more available for the interview process.

“It’s good to see the trend continuing this year, with candidate numbers up by 19% from both the previous month and on a year-on- year basis.

“Despite the lingering uncertainty in the economy, confidence among professionals appears to be growing,” said Brian Murphy, chief executive of Premier Group Ireland — Morgan McKinley Ireland’s parent.

The third quarter showed a 45% year-on- year increase in job availability.

However, while this year is outperforming 2009, the latest quarter is only up marginally from the preceding quarter, which indicates that growth in vacancies is actually slowing as the year nears its end.

That said, however, the third quarter is traditionally the slowest period due to its inclusion of the holiday months of July and August.

Meanwhile, the profile of job vacancies — witnessed across Premier’s network of offices in Dublin, Cork, Kilkenny, Limerick and Waterford — covered a wide range of sectors and functions; including sales/marketing, office support and customer services, insurance, legal, HR, engineering, life sciences and IT.

Activity during the quarter was most active in IT.

“There was a sizeable improvement in the development space with technical requirements becoming more critical, not only core languages such as Java and .Net, but also knowledge of the latest platforms such as web services and enterprise applications, including Oracle and SAP.

“We also saw a lot of IT activity within the application support and testing areas with strong demand for support and configuration of web-based applications,” Mr Murphy said.