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Job advertisements that welcome graduates or specify a salary range have received more applications.
Despite a slowing recruitment market and cautious employers, Hong Kong job seekers showed a more aggressive mindset towards finding better career opportunities in 2024, according to Jobsdb's latest annual employment data.
Meanwhile, the data showed that employers adopted more cautious hiring strategies in 2024, resulting in a 10% year-on-year decline in the total number of job advertisements in the market. Especially, job advertisements seeking to hire fresh graduates decreased by 37%.
This comes as jobseekers showed an increasing desire to change jobs and proactively submitted more applications to enhance their chances of success. According to the platform’s 2024 data:
- the average number of views per job advertisement rose by 30% year-on-year
- the average number of job applications per advertisement surged by 81%
- the number of candidates submitting over 100 applications per month nearly doubled (+93%) year-on-year
The three areas with the strongest growth in recruitment demand were:
- Community services and development (+63%),
- Real estate and property (+21%), and
- Healthcare and medical (+18%)
The sectors with the greatest growth of professionals submitting applications included:
- Marketing and communications,
- Banking & financial services,
- Information and communication technology,
- Administration and office support, and
- Accounting
The five most sought-after roles were in:
- Information technology,
- Administration & office support,
- Accounting,
- Banking & financial services, and
- Engineering
What kinds of job advertisements were more received by job seekers?
The decreasing number of job advertisements for fresh graduates significantly intensified competition, as job advertisements encouraging fresh graduates received 123% more applications on average compared to the previous year (2023), surpassing the average applications for overall job postings by 13%.
Salary transparency in job advertisements also became more important to job seekers. The data indicated that the proportion of job advertisements disclosing salary ranges rose by 10 percentage points over the past year. Job postings that included salary information attracted 19% more applications than those that did not.
On the other hand, there was a growing desire among jobseekers for overseas work opportunities as “relocation” emerged as a highly sought-after search term on the platform in 2024, with search volume rebounding by 124% after an 18% decline in 2023.
Among all age groups, those aged 21-25 were searching for this term the most frequently, followed by jobseekers aged 26 to 30.
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