Winter is coming: UK job vacancies and wages fall again

• Advertised salaries have dropped consistently since April, as Brexit jitters spook UK hiring companies
• Total advertised vacancies this month sit at 1,121,754 – a 1.4% month on month drop and down over 3% year on year
• A rise to £9 for the ‘real living wage’ will mean pay rises for 180,000 UK workers, but will do little to shore up 2018’s salary stagnation
• Teachers buck the trend with double digit wage growth year on year and more jobs vacancies in education in late 2018 than at any other point in the past two years

The volume of vacancies is still above its April 2018 slump, but represents a 3.1% decline year on year and a definite ‘cooling off’ of the job market as we near the end of the year.

More worryingly, advertised salaries are on their fifth consecutive month of negative growth. While the longer term trend is still positive, these developments threaten to derail the wage recovery the UK economy experienced in the first half of 2018.

Despite the fall in vacancies, the competition for these vacancies is at an all time low. It has fallen to a new low since Adzuna started measuring this in 2012, standing at 0.34 jobseekers per vacancy nationwide. This translates to there being approximately 3 jobs per jobseeker. While it’s clear that record levels of unemployment are keeping the job market propped up, Adzuna’s search data also shows a 12% year on year drop in the number of applications for British jobs from France, Germany, Italy & Spain.

Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, explains:

“It’s worrying to see salaries declining once again, just as real wages were looking like recovering back towards where they were in 2012. Given the competition for jobs is at an all time low, we’d expect salaries to rise as companies compete for the remaining top talent. That said, I am buoyed by the fact that over 180,000 British workers will see a bump in their pay from this month, as the ‘real living wage’ rises to £9 per hour across the country.

“Brexit is clearly having an impact on the health of the U.K job market. Adzuna’s data clearly shows vacancies and wages feeling the pressure, and interestingly, migration patterns for jobs look to be changing as application rates for British jobs drop from workers on the continent.”

Table 1: Total advertised vacancies and salaries

Regional breakdown

Swindon is the undisputed leader as the easiest place to find a job. The top 10 cities have seen very little change since the summer, with Oxford, Cambridge, Reading and Warrington making up the rest of the top 5.

Meanwhile Sunderland is still the hardest place to find a job in the UK, although the rate of jobseekers to vacancies has dropped below 3, meaning that it is becoming easier to find work overall. Elsewhere, Sheffield has dropped into the bottom 10 for the first time.

Table 2: Best-performing job sectors in the UK – annual salaries

 Table 3: Worst-performing job sectors in the UK – annual salaries

It pays to teach

Teaching jobs are experiencing a boost in advertised salaries, up 16.5% year on year, and is currently the fastest growing job sector for salaries. There has also been a small increase in the number of vacancies being advertised, which may point to a struggle to hire and retain teaching staff nationwide.

Cleaners sweeping up the scraps

At the other end of the scale, Domestic Help and Cleaning jobs are falling significantly from an already low base, meaning that cleaners are really feeling the pinch. Also among the sectors that are struggling are Scientific & QA jobs, which has seen a nearly 6% decline in salaries over the past 12 months.

About Adzuna

Adzuna is a search engine for job ads used by over 10 million visitors per month that aims to list every job, everywhere. We search thousands of websites so our users don't have to, bringing together millions of ads in one place. By providing smarter search options and powerful data about the job market, we give jobseekers the information they need to take control of their careers.
Adzuna was founded in 2011 by Andrew Hunter and Doug Monro, formerly of eBay, Gumtree, Qype and Zoopla and is backed by leading Venture Capital firms Passion Capital, The Accelerator Group and Index Ventures. 
Our data also powers the Number 10 Dashboard, used by the Prime Minister and senior officials to keep track of economic growth on a daily basis, and is now provided to the Office for National Statistics to help them build real-time labour market indices.
Adzuna’s mission is to be the best place to start looking for a job. We love using the awesome power of technology to help match people to better, more fulfilling jobs and keep Britain working.

About the Adzuna Job Market Report

Adzuna has the most complete index of UK job vacancies covering all regions in the UK. The technology collects every job vacancy advertised online in the UK from over 500 sources. This data is then normalised, de-duplicated, mix-adjusted and outliers are removed in real time to give users an accurate, complete, up to the minute view of the job market.
Claimant count data is based on the latest Labour Market Statistics released in October 2018 by the ONS. The city areas referred to in this study are the top 50 cities in the UK, ranked by comparing the job vacancies in Adzuna’s comprehensive search index of over 1,000,000 live jobs to the number of claimants in each city from the latest ONS data released in October 2018.
The full Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant count statistics are available for download here: http://www.nomisweb.co.uk/