Online job portal Jobstreet.com said Thursday the job market is expected to return to pre-COVID level by the end of 2021, as companies are slowly and cautiously resuming normal operations.
Jobstreet country manager Philip Gioca said the job market saw a surge in demand for new jobs in the last quarter of 2020 compared with the first six months of the lockdown.
“In the last three months of 2020, we have seen an increase of about 20 percent in terms of hiring, in terms of job available in the market. We continue to see that growth this month of January. And hopefully we are bullish to see this numbers grow higher in the next six months,” Gioca said Thursday during the pre-event briefing for the site’s first virtual career fair on Feb. 17 to 21.
Gioca said Jobstreet was also expecting more relaxed quarantine measures by March that would spur job demands and hiring, especially for retrenched workers and new graduates.
“In fact, we learned from our customers that in March some of them or some companies will now be asking people to report to office. These are all good signs. We are becoming more normal to the new normal, and jobs will be more available,” Gioca said.
He said retrenched employees would have more chances of getting back their jobs as hirers were not discriminating whether an applicant was retrenched. “In fact they prioritize retrenched ones,” he said.
Gioca said new university graduates would also have the same level of hiring opportunities, particularly those involved in digital media and software information.
Jobstreet reported a 20-percent to 30-percent increase or shift to digital services in 2020 which required employees to have digital skills.
It said companies started giving their employees full salaries. Many companies imposed an average of 20 percent cutback on salaries in the past three to six months, the portal said.
“During the lockdown in the last 10 months, we have seen the companies able to survive. They have to manage their cash flows and this involved cutting down on salaries, because that’s one of the biggest expenses of the companies. But in the last quarter, they came to a point where they have augmented or improved their capacity to pay the salaries in full. So they have reverted back,” Gioca said.
Jobstreet said that for 2021, it was expecting better numbers, expansion and increase in sales and services which would improve their cash flow compared to the first six months of the pandemic.
It said, however, said available jobs would not be enough as there were 7 million workers displaced last year, aside from the new graduates who could not find jobs.
Jobstreet said the virtual career fair would offer 55,000 from different industries across the country that include roles such as IT software specialist, digital marketer, sales executive, system analyst, customer service representative, financial consultant, ESL teacher, accountant, engineer, IT developer, HR staff and HR manager.
Among the hiring companies are BDO Unibank Inc., Mercedez Benz Group, LBC Express, Yamaha Philippines, Universal Robina Corp., Aboitiz Construction Co., Converge, 51 Talk, Accenture, TaskUs and Nestle.
