New Zealand job advertising fell again in July, extending a run of monthly declines that has now wiped out the recovery employers thought they were seeing at the start of the year. Job ad volumes were down 0.8 percent on June, according to the SEEK New Zealand Employment Report for July, released on Wednesday.
SEEK described it as a third consecutive monthly fall. The picture is slightly worse than that. The company has recalibrated its earlier data, and on the revised numbers job ads have now fallen for four months straight, with what had looked like growth in the North Island’s main centres disappearing on revision. RNZ reported that the recalibrated figures showed a softer labour market than the original series suggested.
The annual comparison is still positive. Job ad volumes in July were 6.2 percent higher than in July 2025, so employers are advertising more roles than they were a year ago. What has stalled is the month-to-month momentum, and that stall is now long enough to be a trend rather than a wobble.
“July saw a further decline in job ads across New Zealand, with only pockets of growth,” SEEK New Zealand country manager Rob Clark said in the report.
Competition for the roles that are advertised is climbing. Applications per job ad rose 1.6 percent in June, the second monthly rise in a row. That measure is reported with a one month lag, so it lands alongside July’s ad figures rather than matching them. More applicants chasing fewer listings is the clearest signal in the report that the balance of power has shifted back towards employers.
Only four regions recorded any monthly growth at all. The West Coast rose 2.6 percent, Marlborough 1.9 percent, Hawke’s Bay 0.4 percent and Otago 0.1 percent. Everywhere else went backwards. Wellington fell 1.3 percent, Auckland 0.9 percent and Canterbury 0.3 percent.
“Conditions remain strongest in the South Island, while larger centres, including Auckland, Wellington and Waikato, continue to face greater headwinds,” Clark said.
Over a full year the regional gap is wide. The West Coast is up about 25 percent on July 2025 and Hawke’s Bay about 17.5 percent, while the big cities have grown far more slowly. For anyone reading the numbers as a map of where work is, the answer for now is smaller places and the lower half of the country.
By industry, mining, resources and energy led the monthly gains at 3.3 percent, and it has been the standout performer over the year with growth of 38.5 percent. Education and training rose 2.1 percent, engineering 0.6 percent and real estate and property 0.5 percent. Those four were the only industries to grow in the month.
The drag came from trades and services, down 1.0 percent, which SEEK identified as the single largest contributor to the national decline. Healthcare and medical fell 1.4 percent and construction fell 0.9 percent. Construction matters here because it had been carrying the recovery.
“Construction has been a key driver of growth in recent months, particularly in the South Island, but it weakened in July,” Clark said.
Over the year the spread between industries is stark. Industrial roles are up 20.5 percent and construction 18.1 percent, while advertising, arts and media has fallen 20.4 percent and consumer services 2.0 percent. Ad volumes in the creative industries have been shrinking for long enough that the annual number now reads as a structural change rather than a soft patch.
The most striking part of the report has nothing to do with the headline decline. Job ads referencing artificial intelligence skills rose 94.1 percent over the year and 2.8 percent in the month, and they now make up 3.7 percent of all New Zealand job ads. The equivalent share in Australia is 2.1 percent, which puts New Zealand employers well ahead of their Australian counterparts on how often they ask for AI skills by name.
What employers want within that category has shifted. The fastest growing AI skill over the year was ethics and governance, up 368.8 percent. Agentic AI, meaning systems that carry out tasks with limited human direction, rose 118.6 percent, and generative AI rose 77.0 percent. Those are the skills of an organisation working out how to supervise the technology, not one experimenting with it.
“Demand for AI-related skills continues to rise, with the strongest growth in ethics and governance,” Clark said.
AI skills are still concentrated in a handful of white collar fields. They appear in 16.7 percent of information and communication technology job ads, 9.2 percent of marketing and communications ads and 8.2 percent of consulting and strategy ads. The rest of the labour market barely mentions them.
The report also splits job ads by how exposed the work is to automation, and the gap is worth sitting with. Roles with low exposure to AI automation grew 13.7 percent over the year. Roles with high exposure grew 2.3 percent. That is close to a six to one difference in favour of work that is hard to hand to a machine, which is one reading of why mining, construction and engineering keep turning up at the top of the growth tables while office based categories drift.
“Annual growth remains meaningful, particularly in roles with low exposure to AI automation,” Clark said.
The advertising figures land a week after Stats NZ reported unemployment at 5.6 percent for the June quarter, the highest rate since March 2014, with about 166,500 people out of work and youth unemployment for 15 to 19 year olds at 25.3 percent. Job ads are a forward looking indicator, so a fourth straight monthly fall suggests the unemployment rate has not yet turned.
The full report is available from SEEK, and interest.co.nz has published a detailed breakdown of the regional and industry figures.
Are you seeing fewer roles advertised in your industry, or more applicants for the ones you post? Tell us what the job market looks like where you are in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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