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Job vacancies at urgent stage BY SUE NEWMAN
SUE.N@THEGUARDIAN.CO.NZ
Filling yawning gaps in the Ashburton District’s employment market needs to be done with urgency. According to Ashburton Mayor Donna Favel, a district council commissioned report identified 500 job vacancies across the district, but there is often a disconnect between those vacancies and job seekers and that meant, by default, the council seemed to have become a job broker. The district had had record low unemployment for many years, however,
that was not always showing up in advertised job vacancies. “The difficulties I’m seeing is that some people for a long time have been looking for employees. They’ve struggled to find them and have simply stopped advertising. We’ve got the message out there that we need workers, but many of the jobs are not being advertised so people are saying, ‘where are the jobs’?” She believes the district’s growth is being hampered by the lack of a dedicated business organisation that could get a handle on where those job vacancies were, as well as coming up with ways to
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fill them. “Right now we have a lot of employers, particularly farm managers, saying it’s too hard and they’re just working harder themselves to cover the vacancies.” While the district had several employment agencies and individual businesses often advertised vacancies on their own websites, there was no single point of contact for job seekers and employers, Favel said.
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