Hiring is down in South Africa – but these jobs are still in demand

South African hiring activity is down, with only a few sectors increasing hiring over the last year.

This is according to the latest CareerJunction Employment Insights Report for Q3 2024, which analyses the supply and demand trends in the online job market to represent online labour dynamics in South Africa.

The company said that the finding enables business and recruitment agencies to focus on relevant
occupations when developing their talent attraction and retention strategies

Hiring activity in Q3 2024 remained the same as that seen in Q2 2024.

That said, year-on-year activity did drop by 3.7%.

Hiring activity has declined by 7.2% over the past two years (Q3 2022 to Q3 2024).

“Despite a slight update in recruitment activity in the second quarter of 2024, slow hiring activity has been evident for most of the year to date,” said CareerJunction.

That said, some companies are showing increased hiring activity over the past three months.

From Q2 2024 to Q3 2024, the following sectors saw an improvement:

• Architecture & Engineering professionals (+6%)

• Building & Construction professionals (+8%), and

• Sales professionals (+4%).

Nevertheless, there has also been a decline in hiring activity over the two quarters in the following sectors:

• Finance professionals (-1%),

• Warehousing & Logistics professionals (-5%), and

• Legal professionals (-16%).

Careerjunction’s data showed no other bright sparks.

Although IT remains in very high demand in the recruitment market, there was a 3% drop from Q2 2024 to Q3 2024.

Year-on-year, there was a decrease of 17% between Q3 2023 and Q3 2024.

Year-on-year declines were also seen in Admin, Office & Support (-1%), Business & Management (-3%) and finance roles (-2%)

Consistent messaging

The data from CareerJunction aligns with a similar monthly analysis from Pnet.

Pnet’s latest Job Markets Trends Report shows that local hiring activity was down by 11% from July to August 2024, which signals a slowing hiring market.

Year-on-year hiring activity also dropped by 13% compared to August 2023.

In addition, the two-year comparison showed that recruitment activity has reduced by 11% compared to August 2022.

Nevertheless, like CareerJunction’s study, a few jobs in Pnet’s study showed increased demand, with accounting skills highly sought after:

• Internal Auditing (Finance)

• Executive Management / Director (Business & Management)

• Human Resources (Admin, Office & Support)

• Data Analysis / Data Warehousing (Information Technology)

• Account Management (Sales)

Pnet’s data also showed a drop in IT hiring, with a 33% decrease in hiring activity seen over the last two years.

“The decrease in local demand for IT professionals has been fuelled by the global trend of tech layoffs,” said Pnet.

“Retrenchments and job cuts by global giants in the IT sector were first announced at the end of 2022. Companies like Google, Amazon and Meta (Facebook) reduced their Tech staff counts significantly back then.”

“This trend has continued and is still very prevalent in 2024. Google and Amazon are still on the list when it comes to tech layoffs, but other companies like Tesla, TikTok, Microsoft and other companies are also decreasing their Tech staff size in 2024.”

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