LONDON (Reuters) – British job vacancies in March saw the biggest monthly jump since February 2022 after almost a year of falling job posts and salaries ticked up again, suggesting renewed momentum in the labour market, an industry survey found on Wednesday.
Job search website Adzuna said overall online job adverts climbed 2.3% to 1.04 million postings last month.
Andrew Hunter, co-founder at Adzuna, said the figures reflected positive signs of growth in the labour market.
Adzuna said advertised salaries had increased in each month since October last year, reaching an annual average of 37,530 pounds ($46,784.90) in March, an increase of 0.5% from February, and up about 3% year-on-year.
“This would be good news overall but may also lead to the risk of more inflationary pressures later in the year,” Tony Wilson, director at the Institute for Employment Studies said.
The advertised salaries do not include one-off cost-of-living bonuses which some employers offered to staff to help with higher food and energy costs.
Last month’s wage growth remained far below the rate of inflation in Britain, which was running at 10.1% in March.
The Bank of England, which is expected to raise interest rates in May to 4.5% from 4.25%, is concerned about inflation pressure in the jobs market but has said it expects pay growth to slow.
Official figures, published last week, showed a fall in the number of job vacancies in the three months to March but faster-than-expected wage growth in the three months to February.
Adzuna’s monthly survey showed the lowest level of salary transparency since records began in 2016 with the number of jobs displaying pay dropping by nearly a fifth from a year earlier.
The website’s gauge of the average number of people applying for the same role reached its highest since October 2021.
($1 = 0.8022 pounds)
(Reporting by Suban Abdulla; Editing by William Schomberg)
