Our (unscientific) look at live Jobfeed data finds signs of hope for recruitment in 2021. Is the UK jobs market preparing to bounce back from the pandemic?
We are number-crunching our business data again. This time, we provide a head-to-head comparison of live Jobfeed data between November 2020 and March 2021.
This article does not attempt to make a scientific case for any of our findings. We present the information as an interesting talking point. It also serves as a demonstration for the many ways that businesses are able to deploy the Big Data at their fingertips. Maybe you will find your own method to use the job market data for planning, targeting, or business development?
About the Data
The figures in the previous infographics represent live job opportunities as they appear on the Jobfeed database.
Each of these vacancies is unfilled at time of writing, and have been posted directly by the employer themselves. That means that every one is a potential sales opportunity for your recruitment enterprise.
The second point to bear in mind is that these figures represent only a snapshot of two individual points in time. The "30-day" figures for both periods only look at the month prior to reporting. So, for the earlier report, we take 30 consecutive days in October and into November. For our recent update, we look at vacancy numbers for February and the first days of March 2021. The data does not provide a running score of vacancies across the entire, quarterly period of study.
Number-Crunching
Similarly, the weekly and daily figures are not normalised. That is: the 24 hour snapshot may be taken on (eg) a Monday morning for one report, and on a Thursday afternoon for another. This makes them illegible as direct comparisons, for a number of variable reasons. This is why we say that our data studies are not scientific in their method.
Regardless, there has been a clear upward shift in the overall trend. The first point that becomes immediately apparent is the sustained increase in job vacancies across the two periods of study.
While it is easy to discount the validity of the 24-hour snapshot data, the longer time windows offer signs of encouragement. The 7-day snapshot shows a 3.7 per cent increase over the previous period of study.
The monthly snapshot – which offers perhaps the most stable and therefore useful average – indicates a 4.98% increase in job vacancies.
Given that our two previous studies have both indicated a recovery, the latest Jobfeed data will be welcome news.
