One position, 1,200 applications: A snapshot of NZ’s job market right nowThe Spinoff Daily, Monday February 24
Ahiahi mārie, welcome to The Spinoff Daily. Today on The Spinoff: Te Matatini 101, an unsolved case of a Wellington emu murder, and parliament is once again the last place to get the memo about workplace harassment, bullying and common decency.
Gabi Lardies: “‘I feel like a small, dumb worm,’ says Jean*. After seven years of working a string of ‘dead-end’ jobs, she returned to study in her mid-30s to upskill and change her career path. She finished an honours degree in October and has been looking for work ever since. In November, Jean was ‘hard out’ applying for jobs. Then December came around and ‘there was nothing on Seek – there was fucking no jobs’. Job listings cropped up again in January, and Jean began to apply for three jobs a day – in her field and beyond. ‘I tailor my CV to each one and all the cover letters are tailored,’ she says. There have been a couple of interviews but ‘so many fucking rejections’ – many that said they’d had hundreds of applicants. Worst of all, some applications have gone completely ignored. ‘It’s really hard,’ she says, ‘maybe impossible.’ For Olivia, ‘there are zero jobs to apply for’. She has a masters in her field – accessibility and planning – but the few opportunities she sees advertised are only in senior roles, while her experience puts her in the intermediate band. She left a job halfway through last year to go traveling with an informal understanding that ‘there would be a job to come back to’ because so few people are qualified for her role. When she got back in October, she was told that disability funding cuts meant there was no work and no way to employ her. Now, she’s on the benefit and trying to rustle up any work she can get. Jean and Olivia are among about 156,000 unemployed people in New Zealand – unemployment reached the highest level since 2020 in the final quarter of 2024, at 5.1%. In December, the quarterly report on job advertisements from the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation read ‘advertisements fell in all regions, all occupations, all skill levels, and in all industries, except education’. The most recent data, from January, continues this plummeting trend. Forecasters are expecting the rise in unemployment to continue until halfway through this year.”
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One position, 1,200 applications: A snapshot of NZ’s job market right now
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