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Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

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Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#51

Post by netsharc »

vernon99 wrote: post #44
snowpid wrote: post #38

For me, the OP's interpretation is very questionable or at least hasty. The first reason that comes to mind is that there is less recruitment at the end of the year. Because in the above statistics (due to lack of data?) only the data within the year is possible, such rhythms are not recorded. I talk to HR people from different companies (in Berlin) from time to time and they still complain about the lack of skilled…

Have you checked the chart linked by OP? It has data for the same period of the last year and there’s no such drop so it disproves the seasonality thesis. There could be something else of course. But also possible that some companies are being hit by energy crisis.

The data seems to be really in a 365-day window, and on the 1st graph of the dashboard, the beginning and the end seem to be on the same level...

Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#53

Post by moooo99 »

Sladik wrote: post #3
uberman wrote: post #2

0 the y-axis otherwise the chart is misleading.

Good point, now the y-axis starts at 0 but even now we can appreciate how abrupt the fall is.

The fall is abrupt, but not at all surprising. Imho, the data isn’t really sufficient to lead to the conclusion that the job market is crashing.

First of all, judging by the overview chart the decline is steep, but it is currently roughly where it was a year ago. Given that we don’t have a huge tech ecosystem in Germany, most people aren’t employed at tech companies, they are at traditional companies. And for them it’s not that uncommon to see less newly opened positions towards the end of the year. Given that you just started scraping a year ago that seasonality hasn’t been captured so far, but I would expect the job portals data to support this.

Beyond that, many companies dramatically increased hiring in the later (post-) Covid area. It would not surprise me if some companies over hired given the currently harsh economic environment. Since laying off people isn’t as easy as it is in the US, you stop hiring to make up for it.

Also, given my limited experience from the hiring side of things, the demand still seems to outpace the supply of reasonably qualified individuals. According to Statista, Germany had 15k CS graduates in 2021 [1] and turnover of experienced employees is usually relatively low. So considering this and the already declined >100k total openings is still not a real reason to worry (at least based on this data)

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/789519/umfrag...

Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#55

Post by sdfgdfghj »

snowpid wrote: post #38

For me, the OP's interpretation is very questionable or at least hasty. The first reason that comes to mind is that there is less recruitment at the end of the year. Because in the above statistics (due to lack of data?) only the data within the year is possible, such rhythms are not recorded. I talk to HR people from different companies (in Berlin) from time to time and they still complain about the lack of skilled…

> Only next year will there be a slight recession.

How do you know that?

Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#56

Post by _lth »

The presentation is "nice", but not even close to what it needs to be for making any assumptions on the result. Questions that are necessary to be clarified:

1) What is your source? - the slides only state it's the biggest platform. 2) How do you compensate, that your dataset only represents x% of the real offers? 3) If you think you have a reasonable share of the job offers, how do you justify this assumption?

These are the main questions, that I would ask if you tell me to use it as business information - all the technical stuff is secondary. But there are more:

4) How do you compensate a change in recruitment strategy? You are just looking at one platform. 5) What makes you sure, that every item in your dataset is interpreted correctly? Can you somehow make sure, that your parsing and reformating is always correct? Can you verify that? Can you detect if not? 6) Can you detect a change on the website itself, e.g. new categories, differences in job description?

Also my experience is different, with getting a ton of job offers currently, directly via business network, I'm willing to look at a statistics based bigger picture that changes my mind. But the interpretation and the harsh change, together with these open questions make me believe that you more likely have a technical problem. So my advise would be, spend a lot more slides on the data and not the acquisition, because all acquisition effort is useless if you can not verify your data and results.

Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#57

Post by snowpid »

sdfgdfghj wrote: post #55
snowpid wrote: post #38

For me, the OP's interpretation is very questionable or at least hasty. The first reason that comes to mind is that there is less recruitment at the end of the year. Because in the above statistics (due to lack of data?) only the data within the year is possible, such rhythms are not recorded. I talk to HR people from different companies (in Berlin) from time to time and they still complain about the lack of skilled…

> Only next year will there be a slight recession. How do you know that?

We talk about prognosis from different entities.

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/konjunktur/eu-kommissio...

EU commission thinks, it will be a loss of 0.6 %.

Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#58

Post by Varqu »

rognjen wrote: post #49

Since the jobs are scraped and not fetched through an API, I'd also check whether the structure of the site changed in some way. I'm very suspicious of the data, because a 33% decrease in less than a month is unreasonable. Even at the height of Covid, there wasn't that much of a drop-off. My money is on the script being broken.

Yeah, our observations at GermanTechJobs.de also don't align with the OP's data.

November looks more like a recovery month compared to a very bad September and bad October.

Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#59

Post by Sladik »

After some research, my hypothesis might be wrong. Comparing the different data sources I have found out that there is a drop only in one them, so my best guest is that an increase in the job post price or a change in the business model (e.g. shortening the length of the time a job is posted) is the most likely reason for the drop we can see in November.

Re: Tell HN: The German job market is crashing

#60

Post by Sladik »

sdevonoes wrote: post #40

Interesting! Are you planning to keep recollecting data for the year 2023? > the major job offer portal in Germany for over one year I hope that's Linkedin. Because if it's another site like Monster, StepStone or similars, I'm afraid the data is probably garbage. I don't know a single engineer in Germany who uses anything but Linkedin (well, many engineers use niche job boards like remoteok, or directly use the compa…

I am working on integrating additional sources, and Linkedin will be definitely one of them.
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