There were a record 451,000 job vacancies in the first quarter of this year, while the number of unemployed fell to 338,000. There are now 133 vacancies per 100 unemployed, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported on Tuesday. There are 11 million Dutch people at work, 2.7 million of whom are flex workers.
It is the fourth time in a row that the number of unfilled vacancies has broken a record, while the number of unemployed continues to fall. There were 338,000 unemployed in the first quarter. That’s 3.5 percent of the workforce and the lowest number ever. Statistics Netherlands defines the unemployed as people without paid work, who have recently searched for it and are immediately available.
Unemployment fell because more people found work than lost their jobs. As a result, there were 63,000 fewer unemployed. At the same time, there were also 31,000 unemployed because there were more people looking for work without finding it than there were people who stopped looking or suddenly became unavailable. In other words, there were 32,000 fewer unemployed.
As more people found work, the number of jobs rose by 127,000 to a record high of 11.2 million. 8.8 million of these are employee jobs and 2.4 million Dutch people are self-employed. 2.7 million employee jobs were on a flexible contract, 25,000 more than a quarter earlier.
Fewer flex jobs than before the corona crisis
Yet there are still fewer flexible jobs than before the corona crisis. At the beginning of the corona crisis, when companies had to implement redundancies to save, mainly flex workers were kicked out. They are now slowly being re-accepted, but the number is not yet at the level it was before.
At the end of the first quarter, there were more vacancies in all sectors than in the previous quarter, but the most were created in the hospitality industry. The number of vacancies in cafés and restaurants has doubled compared to the last quarter of last year. Then the number of ads there shrank because of the lockdown that was in effect at the time. Most vacancies were open in trade.
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