Anyone who takes an interest in the economy and looks at the regular ‘real time’ indicators on the Office for National Statistics website (section 6 via link) can’t help but to have been struck by the extent of job adverts in the logistics and transport sector, with ONS having to rescale the graphs back in June to accommodate the enormous increase!
However, anyone who works in logistics can’t have helped being struck by February not being the best base to use as an index for our industry.
So, what is my graph showing? ONS has been accessing job advert numbers via Adzuna, an online job search engine that collates information from thousands of different sources in the UK. I’ve downloaded a data set from ONS that goes back to 2018 and through to about a fortnight ago. I’ve shown the job adverts for our industry (transport, logistics, warehousing), shown by the continuous purple line, and those for the UK as a total, shown by the continuous blue line.
Continued below graph...)
The ONS data uses an index in which February 2020 acts as a base line for measuring increases and decreases in activity. February 2020 is roughly when Covid hit the country and ahead of the first lockdown. February 2020 = 100 – the first of my bright pink rings going left to right across the graph, and the blue dotted line drawing attention to that level across the whole time period shown. A value of 90 would mean that there were less job adverts than the base line and a value of 110 would mean that there were 10% more adverts.
You can see that the need to advertise for logistics staff varies a great deal more than UK plc, and that a typical level of adverts for logistics has been 85% higher at peak than it has been in February for both years before Covid got going – this level is shown by the purple dotted line.
In February 2020 the level of adverts was typical for our industry for February, but that’s not a typical level of adverts for our industry across the normal year.
Between February and May 2020, as Covid bit, logistics job ads dropped in line with the rest of the UK – see the second of the pink rings on the graph. For the UK as a whole, job ads were at about a third in May of what they had been in February. For logistics, job ads in May were only a sixth of what they had been the previous peak. So, it’s no surprise that as things relaxed and ‘eat out to help out’ encouraged people to come out of their houses in the summer and spend, the number of job ads started to rise and by the autumn had exceeded the previous peak levels.
But what’s very clear is that few people in logistics saw what was coming post-Brexit, and with IR35 and further relaxation of Covid restrictions thrown into the mix. By mid-January 2021, shown by the third pink ring on the graph, job ads in our industry had dropped back to normal post-peak levels, albeit above the level of ads across the rest of UK plc. Since then, the increases in job ads in logistics have been enormous - I don’t like hyperbole like ‘stratospheric’, but somehow ‘enormous’ doesn’t really do justice to what has happened!
By mid-April 2021 job ads in logistics had beaten the figure for peak 2020, which in itself was higher than both the previous peaks. By late June it was 50% higher than for peak 2020 as a combination of hospitality, staycations, the school holidays and logistics staff's own holidays all started to create a perfect storm.
The ONS uses this data to act as a proxy for vacancies, and has done its best to de-duplicate this data – the Adzuna data is from thousands of different sources, so it includes multiple instances of the same job - it collates direct employers’ websites to recruitment software providers to traditional job boards thus providing a comprehensive view of current online job adverts.
But I’m left wondering whether the job adverts for our industry, which has been so dependent on agencies to fill roles at peak and often at other times, include hidden duplication. How obvious is it if Agency 1 and Agency 2 both advertise generally, knowing that by being first to recruit an extra driver they will get some extra business. While at the same time, the end company may well also be advertising if it is a permanent role. Has the de-duplication managed to address multiple companies essentially advertising the same role and contributing to the feeding frenzy?
While there are plainly many, many vacancies, I guess where my train of thought ends up is that job adverts may not be a good indicator of vacancy levels for an industry so dependent on agencies.