SEEK NZ Employment Report - July

12 Aug 2026, 11:36 by SEEK NZ · SCOOP

AI Insights:

3.7% of job ads reference AI skills in New Zealand, compared to 2.1% in Australia.
Job ads with low automation exposure rose 13.7% y/y, while those with high exposure rose 2.3%.

National Insights:

Job ads fell for a third consecutive month, down 0.8% in July.
Applications per job ad rose for a second month, up 1.6%, as the number of opportunities for candidates fell.

Region Insights:

Hawkes Bay (0.4%), Marlborough (1.9%), West Coast (2.6%) and Otago (0.1%) were the only regions to record a rise in monthly job ad volumes.
Ad volumes in all regions remain higher y/y although the rate of growth has slowed.

Industry Insights:

Mining Resources & Energy has recorded the most significant and consistent growth, up 3.3% m/m and 38.5% y/y.
A 1.0% drop in demand for Trades & Services workers was the largest contributor to the overall monthly decline.

Rob Clark, SEEK NZ Country Manager, says:

“July saw a further decline in job ads across New Zealand, with only pockets of growth. Conditions remain strongest in the South Island, while larger centres, including Auckland, Wellington and Waikato, continue to face greater headwinds.

“Construction has been a key driver of growth in recent months, particularly in the South Island, but it weakened in July and the industry is no longer lifting the national figures.

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“Despite the monthly decline, annual growth remains meaningful, particularly in roles with low exposure to AI automation, including those within Mining, Resources & Energy, Construction and Engineering.

“AI is also becoming more visible in job ads. Demand for AI-related skills continues to rise, with the strongest growth in ethics and governance. This suggests AI is moving beyond a specialised technical skillset in a handful of white-collar industries and becoming part of broader business practice, particularly at senior levels.”

AI Insights
Job ads referencing AI skills increased 2.8% m/m in July and 94.1% y/y. This was slower than the 109.4% y/y growth recorded in June.

Among the types of skills commonly referenced were AI Ethics & Governance (368.8% y/y), Agentic AI (118.6% y/y) and Generative AI (77.0% y/y).

3.7% of total job ads make reference to AI or AI skills, compared to 2.1% of Australian jobs ads. These are most commonly referenced in Information & Communication Technology roles (where skills are mentioned in 16.7% of total job ads) Marketing & Communications (9.2% of total jobs ads) and Consulting & Strategy roles (8.2% of total job ads).

Figure 1: The SEEK AI Gauge – Measure of job ads that include AI-related keywords

When categorising roles into those that have low, medium and high AI automation exposure levels (see note 1), it is clear that those with low exposure are growing to a greater degree than those with medium or high exposure levels (Figure 2). This does not necessarily indicate AI is dampening hiring; it is more likely a result of wider compositional changes to the market.

Figure 2: Annual job ad growth by average task automation score - low, medium and high AI automation.

National Insights

Job ads fell 0.8% in June, marking four months of incremental decline following more than a year of growth (note 2).

Figure 3: National SEEK job ad percentage change m/m (July 2025 to July 2026)

The recent decline has been driven by falling job ads in the largest regions of Auckland, Wellington and Waikato. Most of the South Island, and smaller pockets in the North, have continued to grow over the past quarter.

Applications per job ad have picked up over the past two months, rising 1.6% in June, as candidates continue to apply for a reduced number of job ads.

Figure 4: Job ads and applications per job ad trend over time

Region Insights

All regions are recording higher job ad volumes y/y, although growth has slowed and more regions have recorded declines in recent months.

In July, all but four regions recorded a monthly fall in job ads: Hawkes Bay (0.4% m/m), Marlborough (1.9% m/m), West Coast (2.6% m/m) and Otago (0.1%). In the South Island, this growth is likely driven by a rise in Hospitality & Tourism and Construction rolesacross regional areas outside of Canterbury.

In Auckland, job ads dropped 0.9% m/m, led by declines in major hiring industries such as Sales (-2.4% m/m), Manufacturing, Transport & Logistics (-1.8% m/m) and Trades & Services (-1.9% m/m). In Wellington, Government & Defence, Accounting and Healthcare & Medical drove the 1.3% monthly fall.

Job ads in Bay of Plenty, which has recorded a significant rise in unemployment, fell 0.6% m/m, but are 8.6% higher y/y. This makes annual job ad volumes only slightly below average and does not indicate any significant dropoff in hiring activity.

Canterbury, which has been notably resilient over the past 12 months, recorded its second monthly decline in July, down 0.3%. Growth in several large hiring industries, including Manufacturing, Transport & Logistics (2.0%) and Trades & Services (1.3%), was offset by a 1.7% decline in Construction, which had helped support the region over the past year.

Figure 5: SEEK job ad percentage growth/decline by region, comparing i) July 2026 to June 2026 (m/m) and ii) July 2026 to July 2025 (y/y)

Industry Insights

Four industries recorded m/m growth in July: Mining, Resources & Energy (3.3% m/m), Education & Training (2.1%), Engineering (0.6%) and Real Estate & Property (0.5%). Mining Resources & Energy recorded the strongest sustained growth of all industries over the past year, up 38.5% y/y.

Construction, which had driven growth across multiple regions for many months, declined 0.9% nationally in July. Demand for workers on construction projects in South Island regions outside Canterbury continued to rise, up 2.7% m/m, but fell elsewhere.

Healthcare & Medical job ads have declined since February, and fell a further 1.4% nationally in July, and was the second biggest contributor to job ad decline for the month, behind Trades & Services (-1.0%).

Many of the large hiring industries are still recording strong annual demand, despite subdued hiring in recent months. The Industrial sector, which includes Mining, Manufacturing and Farming roles, has grown 20.5% in the year to July, while the Construction sector (note 3), which includes Construction, Engineering and Trades roles has increased 18.1%. Consumer Services was the only sector to record an annual decline (-2.0% y/y) with fewer roles across Hospitality & Tourism (-2.0% y/y), Real Estate & Property (-9.7% y/y) and Advertising Arts & Media (-20.4% y/y) among others.

NOTES

1. Automation exposure, as defined by Jobs and Skills Australia, measures the degree to which tasks within a given role can be automated by Generative AI and assigned an average score to each role – the average task automation score. Figure 3 maps annual job ad growth at the role level, according to roles with low, medium and high scores. Roles and their scores can be viewed on the Jobs and Skills Australia site.

2. Job ads for the past few months have been recalibrated for trend and seasonality, changing the past four months from growth reported in prior reports, to decline.

3. Construction is both a sector category comprising various industries and an industry category.

About the SEEK Employment Report

The SEEK Employment Report is New Zealand’s leading employment index and provides a comprehensive overview of the New Zealand Employment Marketplace. The report includes the SEEK Employment Index (SEI) which measures only new job ads posted within the reported month to provide a clean measure of demand for labour across all classifications.

To improve this index and continuously ensure its market accuracy, SEEK has recently implemented three main changes to the data within these reports i) the data is reported to one decimal place, ii) reporting on trend estimates rather than seasonally adjusted estimates from August 2025 onwards and ii) the inclusion of company listings in the SEI from November 2025.

The SEI may differ to the job ad count on SEEK’s website due to a number of factors including a) the trend adjustments applied to the SEI; and b) the exclusion of duplicated job ads from the SEI.

Caution is recommended when interpreting trend estimates during the COVID period as large month-to-month changes in variables generated multiple trend breaks.

The applications per ad index contains a series break at Jan 2016 when the calculation of this series changed from using gross variables (inclusive of all SEEK job ads) to net variables (removing duplicate job ads). This change has a negligible impact on recent data points, but caution is recommended when interpreting data immediately following the series break, and particularly in 2016 where growth rates have not been adjusted for the series break.

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