SA enters top 5 for ‘job hiring near me’ global searches on Google

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a drastic impact on South Africa’s economy with government issuing a R500-billion relief fund package while multiple companies have been placed under business rescue and employees have been retrenched.

This means that a lot of people are currently in the job-hunting market. According to Finbold, South Africa is one of the top five countries globally with the most searches for nearby jobs.

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The number of people searching for “job hiring near me” on Google saw a whopping increase of 242% in the last three months around the world due to various factors, including the virus pandemic.

The data acquired by Finbold overviewed the job searches between April 6, 2020, and June 29, 2020, which indicated a popularity score of 28 and 96 respectively between the two periods.

The popularity scores represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time according to the Google trends platform.

A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term while a value of 50 means that the term is half as popular while a score of zero meant there was not enough data for this term.

South Africa sits in fourth spot among countries like the United States (US) and Australia in the highest interest in nearby jobs searches with a popularity score of 13.

Philippines sits at the number one spot with a popularity score of 100 while the US occupies the second spot with a popularity score of 72.

While Canada with a popularity score of 21 occupies the third spot with Australia capping the top five spots with a popularity score of 7.

This follows Stats South Africa’s (Stats SA) confirmation that the unemployment rate in the country stood at 30.1%, which is the highest rate ever recorded.

Stats SA said the number of unemployed people increased to 7.1 million in the first quarter, however, this was before the Covid-19 lockdown which came into place in March.

“The number of employed persons decreased by 38,000 to 16.4 million and the number of unemployed persons increased by 344,000 to 7.1 million in the first quarter.

“The largest employment decreases were observed in the formal sector (50,000), followed by the agricultural sector with 21,000 in the first quarter.

Meanwhile, employment in the informal sector and private households increased by 3,000 and 30,000 respectively.

Elsewhere, South Africa’s gross domestic product decreased by 2% in the first quarter of 2020, thus continuing the country’s recessionary trend, which followed the economy shrinking by 1.4% in the fourth quarter of 2019.

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