A selection of recent Eye catching news stories during June 2008:

Further Bloodbath for Recruitment Stocks
ASX listed recruitment stocks continued to fall to new 6 month lows virtually across the board with drops from between 21% and 79% on the back of a widely reported softening in the Australian employment market. Why the industry has been marked down so badly remains a mystery as in most cases, the trading prospects remain fair, albeit down from more optimistic forecasting at the beginning of 2008. Some is also attributed to the more gloomier US and UK economies and some uncertainty in the Asia Pac region, particularly in light of the rapid rise in oil prices.

This is in contrast to a report in the AFR in early June under the headline “doom and gloom overdone in IT sector”. Commenting on the poor performance of smaller IT listed stocks which have seen share prices almost half over 12 months, pointing out that while IT spend will slow, investors were described as over pessimistic and most likely to have over reacted, particularly with the ICT skills shortage still very evident - here’s hoping.

Jobs Figures on the slide
Latest figures on unemployment from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for May, recorded an overall 20,000 employment decline, with full-time employment falling by 10,400 to 7,645,200 along with a further 9,300 decline in part time employed to 3,046,000. Seasonally adjusted, unemployment remained steady at 4.3% with an overall participation rate down 0.3% to 65.2% or 10.69 million people. The upside is that this will have contributed to relieving pressure on the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates to further cool demand, reports the SMH.

These modest increases in unemployment compare very favourably with the US where unemployment jumped from 5% to 5.5%, the fifth consecutive monthly increase and the largest monthly swing recorded in 22 years.

Job Ads Down
Further evidence of a slowing jobs market was picked up by the ANZ job advertisement series that counts job advertisements on both the internet and major newspapers. Overall, the total numbers of jobs fell by 1.7% during May, however newspaper advertising was actually down by 13.5%, a fall of 16% since this time last year and the biggest monthly decline for almost 8 years. Online ads in major job boards recorded a very modest fall of 0.7% during the month. The ANZ co-head of Australian Economics was quoted as saying “the falls were consistent with the bank’s view that job advertising had plateaued for the first half of 2008”.

Sydney still an okay place to live
Not only is Sydney the world’s 10th best city from a worldwide quality of living index perspective, it also tied with Melbourne and Perth as being the world’s 29th safest city - all very reassuring! The annual ranking by Mercer rates 215 cities against a range of 39 criteria to produce its annual rankings. 10th place sounds pretty good, however Sydney has actually fallen from 9th place last year but on the whole, “Australian cities enjoy among the best standards of living in the world” says a Mercer spokesman, as reported in the SMH.

Happiness is the key to staff retention, not money!
In an interesting short article on the BBC website, a UK survey from City and Guilds suggests that “good relations with colleagues and managers are more important to staff than large salaries”. Maintaining a strong interest in the job and achieving a good work-life balance were more likely to keep satisfied staff in their job. Established reward and recognition policies may need to be rethought through to achieve an overall “workplace happiness” to be able to attract and retain the best staff.

The dangers of Email
Numbers of employees being disciplined for leaking company secrets via email is on the rise, according to a new survey from Proofpoint / Forrester, reports the Australian. Their local survey identified that one in five businesses terminated an employee for email breaches during the previous year. Emails were listed as the main leakage mode at 62%, with web-based email at 18% and other message systems at 15%. The article highlights both the benefits and the downside of the technology, noting that 42% had identified that their email security systems did not allow adequate reporting re policy enforcement.