COVID-19: Impacts on the labor market. Picture of doom

The world’s financial markets largely ignored the Covid-19 while it was spreading in China. But in late February, they reacted sharply to the virus in Europe and the Middle East, and fear of the pandemic took on a global dimension. Now the risks associated with the coronavirus are aggressively affecting the pricing of different asset classes, and so some fear that a global economic recession is inevitable.

The labor market is a very good indicator of the state of the well being of an economy. The better companies are doing, the more they will tend to invest in new people. This results in their need to fill in more new jobs. In a good economy, there are many jobs, while in a weak economy the number of jobs will decrease. That’s why we took a deeper look at the labor market for the last six months and found out, how COVID-19 impacted industries in different countries.

In order to provide valid results, we analyzed 2.5M data from job portals and career websites across the world in the first half of 2020, which are split into Q1 — pre-COVID, and Q2 — post-COVID period. For that, we set up crawlers that would fetch all available job posts, download them, and then we could analyze the data. In our analysis we differentiated between countries, job families, and industries.

In the pre-COVID-19 area Q1 there were 1.5 million jobs worldwide while in Q2 in the post-COVID time there were only 1 million jobs. The peak of job postings was in the middle of February — 165K jobs postings were available on the market. The lowest point was in the 3rd week of April — only 71K jobs searched. That’s a decline of almost 60% from the top to the bottom in just 2 months! If we look at averages, average, between Q1 and Q2 job investment has decreased by 30% globally. Looking at the last two months, May and June, we can already see again a slight increase of around 15%.

And the winner is… China! China has experienced an increase in job postings between the pre- and post-COVID-19 era in our analysis. The main explanation here is that for China the COVID-19 period started earlier. In the middle of January during the big lockdown, there were almost no job postings available in China. Now it has increased again by about 10% compared to the pre-COVID-19 era.

The second place is shared by India and Switzerland. Both countries have been approximately flat between Q1 and Q2. All the other countries in our table have actually significant decreases in job postings. The positions 4 and 5 on our list took Brazil and Singapore with a decrease of about 25% in the number of job postings. However, please consider, that our analysis stops in June: that is the reason why Brazil is so far high in the table. The country was heavily affected first in July. That is also reflected in our numbers: at the end of June, the labor market in Brazil already started to decline.

The countries that are in the middle of the list with about 30-40% decline in the job postings are mostly large economies countries.

• Vietnam
• US
• France
• Australia
• France
• Poland
• Italy
• Germany

More about how COVID-19 affected different industries in the text below.

The most crisis-proof job families are IT, Manufacturing, and Data Analytics with a decrease of roughly -25% in the number of job postings. Next in the list of the crisis-proof job families are Medical and Finance jobs. Most negatively affected job families with the decreases of -40%, or even -50% or more are Marketing, Sales, Procurement / Logistics. Which job family is on the very bottom of our table? Surprisingly, it’s Human Resources with an almost -60% decrease.

Let’s have a look at how COVID-19 affected different industries around the globe. In our analysis, we focused on eight industries: electronics, IT, food and retail, automotive, fashion, travel, security, and eCommerce. As a cross-industry indicator, we took all the tech giants and analyzed them to see how they were performing. In the first half of 2020 across these 8 industries, there were globally 680.000 job postings. Thereof 400.000 in Q1 and 280.000 in Q2.