Staffing industry barely benefits from labor market recovery
There were 164,000 more jobs in the third quarter of this year than a quarter earlier. So the labor market recovered significantly in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. Yet the temporary employment industry benefited very little from this.
Moderate recovery in staffing industry
Interestingly, the staffing industry barely benefited from the recovery in the third quarter. Where you would expect the staffing industry to pick up first, the number of jobs at the employment agencies are only moderately comfortable with a increase of 17,000 from the second to the third quarter. And this after the staffing industry recorded a record decline in the second quarter. The number of jobs at employment agencies, in fact, fell by 130,000 from the first to the second quarter, a decline of -17%. Such a large decline was unprecedented. Compared to the first quarter of 2020, the beginning of the corona crisis, saw the largest job decline in temporary employment agencies. In the past two quarters, 106,000 temp jobs were lost, a decline of -13.7%.
More permanent, less flex
Incidentally, it should be noted that since last year there has already been a trend toward more permanent jobs (indefinite contracts) and fewer flex contracts. The number of employees with a flexible employment grew almost continuously until 2019, but has already started to decline during last year. In the third quarter from 2020, there were 1.7 million workers in flexible employment. This is 274,000 fewer than in the third quarter of 2019. The number of workers in permanent employment increased by 148,000 to 5.7 million compared to the third quarter of last year.
More vacancies
At the end of September, it was number of vacancies again rose to 216,000, 16,000 more than a quarter earlier. This is a slight recovery. By comparison; a record 286,000 job openings had still been posted at the end of 2019. Due to the corona crisis, the number of job openings in the first half of the year was down 86,000, a decrease of -30%.
Nevertheless, the job market recovered well in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. During the third quarter, 264,000 new job openings were created. That is 48,000 more than in the second quarter.
At the end of September, the most job openings were in trade (42,000), health care (38,000) and business services (34,000). Collectively, these three industries accounted for for half of all open positions.
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