Online job postings fall 87% in April

The general holidays and safety measures imposed to tackle the deadly Covid-19 crisis have led to job cuts in the private sector.

New recruitment is not even under the employers' consideration now.

In April, the number of new job advertisements in the country's major job hunting website fell by 87 percent compared to the same period last year.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) revealed this information in its policy brief "Covid-19 Impact on Job Postings: Real-Time Assessment Using Bangladesh and Sri Lanka Online Job Portals," on Friday.

The brief used data from leading online job portals, in terms of job postings, of both countries. 

It undertook a rapid assessment of labour demand in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to understand the impacts of Covid-19. 

This assessment was built on previous experience of the ADB in skill demand analysis using online job portal data.

Bangladesh's data was taken from Bdjobs.com, and Sri Lanka's from topjobs.lk.

AKM Fahim Mashroor, chief executive officer of Bdjobs.com, told The Business Standard, "It is true that Covid-19 has cut some existing employment and closed the door of new employment. The ADB brief reflects this reality." 

"A positive shift in employment opportunity will depend on the normalisation of economic condition. Data from online job postings can reflect the overall job market as about 100 percent of the white-colour job is being posted on websites."

Online job postings in Sri Lanka dropped by 70 percent in March compared to the same month in the previous year, showed the brief. 

The decline has been rapid in Bangladesh's textile industry. Whereas Sri Lanka's tourism and hospitality industries have shown no sign of recovery with negligible job postings. 

Although the situation needs to be monitored continuously in both countries, the information and communication technology (ICT) industry might show signs of recovery – the first among several industries.

In Bangladesh, job postings dropped by 35 percent in March and 87 percent in April compared to the same period of the previous year, while in February it was only 1 percent, said the ADB brief.

Despite the poor performance of all sectors to create new jobs in Bangladesh, textile, education, manufacturing, health and the ICT sector have played a significant role behind drastic fall in the rate of the new job postings.

Compared to April 2019, the number of job postings in April this year was down by 95 percent in textile and education industries and by 92 percent in the manufacturing industry.

The sharp decline in the textile industry may be related to the pandemic affecting key export markets such as Europe and the United States, the ADB explained.

The manufacturing industry is also being affected by disruptions in intermediate imports, bringing down the rate of online job posting for the sector to 8 percent.

Covid-19 also hit the health sector hard and online job posting for it dropped by 82 percent in April, which was 81 percent in the ICT sector.

The nongovernment organisations performed better compared to the other sectors with 64 percent lower online job postings, possibly due to the need for development assistance in the current emergency.

These ADB findings clearly show that businesses stopped hiring workers because of the Covid-19 outbreak. 

Also, job applications declined in tandem with falling job postings.

Compared to the same months in 2019, job applications were 63 Percent in March 2020 and 19 percent in April.

"The online job postings are a proxy for labour demand and could fill the gap in the current labour market monitoring system by providing time series job posting information in real-time," the ADB brief said.

"While online job portal data are not representative of the entire labour market, they can readily capture the impact on labour demand caused by Covid-19 lockdowns."

Some 122 million Indians were forced out of jobs last month. They include hawkers, roadside vendors, and construction workers, said a report of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

And more than 40 million people – or one in four US workers — filed for unemployment benefits since the pandemic took hold. 

Another 2.1 million new unemployment claims were filed last week, says a report of The New York Times.