The number that misleads
New Zealand has 165,000 people officially unemployed and a 5.4% jobless rate. That sounds like a buyer’s market for employers. It is not.
SEEK’s data published today paints a sharply different picture. Between September 2025 and February 2026, job ads for automation engineers surged 184.8% year-on-year. Salespeople were up 145.5%. Truck drivers up 126.1%. HVAC technicians up 118.8%. Roofers up 108.8%. Trades and services featured three times in the top 10. Construction and ICT each appeared twice.
Overall SEEK job ads were up 13% year-on-year in March 2026, with construction posting the largest annual rise at 36%. The recovery is real, but it is concentrated in sectors where the available labour pool is thinnest.
More ads, fewer workers
Here is the uncomfortable paradox. Despite construction ads surging, construction employment actually fell by 4,300 workers in the year to December 2025, to 295,100. Stats NZ data for September 2025 showed construction filled jobs down 4.5% annually. Employers are advertising harder for workers who do not exist in sufficient numbers.
The 5.4% unemployed are not, in the main, diesel mechanics, HVAC technicians or automation engineers. They are concentrated in sectors and skill levels where the ad recovery has been weakest. Around 40% of New Zealand businesses report difficulty finding skilled workers, with technicians regularly among the hardest roles to fill.
SEEK NZ Country Manager Rob Clark framed the divide in February: “The longer-term picture is roles in engineering, farming, construction, trades, healthcare are all growing at about 20 percent year-on-year. So they’re the key drivers of activity at the moment.”
The South Island is outrunning the cities
The geographic pattern compounds the problem. SEEK’s February data shows Otago up 23.0% year-on-year, Southland up 21.3%, West Coast up 20.9%, Canterbury up 20.0%. Auckland and Wellington are showing little momentum.
This is the opposite of the traditional cycle, where main centres lead the recovery. A Southland engineering firm competing for a diesel technician is up against not just Christchurch employers but Australian resource projects offering higher wages and a warmer immigration welcome. The strongest demand is in the regions with the smallest available workforces.
AI is arriving but not rescuing anyone yet
AI references in job ads have risen 143.5% since March 2025, which sounds transformative until you see they still appear in only 2.9% of all ads. The technology shift is real but early-stage. Automation engineers topping the growth chart at 184.8% suggests businesses are investing in the capability, but the talent market for those roles is already fiercely competitive.
MBIE’s 2026 hiring analysis confirms the structural drivers are long-term: population ageing, infrastructure demand, and replacement needs rather than short-term growth. Outside priority occupations, employers report wider candidate pools. Inside them, the squeeze is getting worse.
Waiting for the market to normalise is the wrong strategy
It is worth remembering how deep the preceding hole was. MBIE’s Jobs Online data for March 2025 showed ads falling 21.7% year-on-year, the tenth consecutive quarterly decline. The current recovery, impressive as the percentages look, is partly a rebound from that low base.
But in the sectors that matter to businesses with physical operations, the supply constraint is structural, not cyclical. Applications per job ad fell 2.4% month-on-month in February, and as the TechTrade February outlook noted bluntly, most project delays this year are caused not by funding or materials but by people.
Clark put the broader trajectory plainly: “We had a significant decline in job advertising, then it was pretty flat and now we’re seeing growth… because we’re seeing it across most industries and most geographies, that implies that it’s a genuine market movement.”
Businesses sitting on their hands waiting for the labour market to soften enough to hire on their terms are misreading the data. The market has softened, just not in the occupations where it matters. If you need a roofer, a truck driver, or an automation engineer, the window is narrowing. The 165,000 people looking for work are not the answer to your problem.
Sources
- NZ Herald: Seek reveals the 10 most in-demand jobs in 2026 (2026-04-27)
- RNZ: New figures show slow growth in job market (2026-02-19)
- Stats NZ: Employment indicators – September 2025 (2025-09)
- Working In NZ: The changing demand for skilled trades in New Zealand (2026-03-13)
- Yotru: Hiring Trends in New Zealand for 2026 (2026-04-27)
- TechTrade: February 2026 Labour Demand – Engineering and Trades Outlook (2026-02-01)