Key investment points
Employment market prosperity tracking: the performance in December 2023 is basically stable, and there is still room for recovery of prosperity.
At the macro level, the urban survey unemployment rate in December 2023 will be 5.1%,+0.1 pct month on month; In December, the PMI employee indicators of manufacturing industry/service industry were 47.9/46.3, down 0.2/0.4 pct month on month. At the micro level, from the perspective of the monthly number of posts published by the mainstream online recruitment platform, the overall number of new posts in December 2023 will decrease month on month, and there will be obvious differentiation between industries; From the active data of job seekers on the mainstream online recruitment platform, the month on month MAU also declined in December. We believe that the supply and demand of the employment market did not improve significantly in December, which may be due to the low recruitment season at the end of the year. We should pay close attention to the recovery of the prosperity of each industry segment.
Looking at the recruitment end by industry: the number of new jobs in December 2023 decreased slightly month on month, and the industry differentiation was obvious.
According to the monthly job data released by mainstream online recruitment platforms, in December 2023, the number of new jobs in five of the 33 industries we counted increased month on month, 27 industries declined month on month, and one industry remained flat month on month.
Among them, the transportation, machinery and equipment, media, social services, and beauty care industries went up on a month on month basis, while some consumer industries, such as food and beverage, light industry manufacturing, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishery, and some cyclical industries, such as coal, basic chemicals, environmental protection, and utilities, declined significantly on a month on month basis.
Looking at the recruitment end by size: small enterprises still have demand resilience, and the demand for large and medium-sized enterprises has accelerated to decline. In December 2023, the employment demand of large and medium-sized enterprises with more than 500 people will decline significantly, and the number of positions of enterprises with more than 10000 people will decline 12.9% month on month (down 5.2% in November). The demand for small enterprises (less than 500 people) is still resilient. In December, the number of small enterprise positions decreased by 3.1% month on month, and the proportion of small enterprise positions remained around 74%, rising slightly to 76% in December.
Looking at the job-hunting end from the number of users of the online recruitment platform: the number of monthly active users of MAU has continued to decline on a month on month basis since October 2023 according to the data of BOSS direct employment and Liepin. The BOSS direct employment MAU still has significant advantages over other similar apps. At the same time, the DAU/MAU data of BOSS direct employment and Liepin have continued to decline on a month on month basis since November. We believe that, Referring to the historical data of Baidu search index on "recruitment", "recruitment information" and "job hunting", the end of the year has never been the peak season for job hunting, and the short-term activity of job seekers has slightly loosened, which may be mainly due to seasonal factors and other interference.
Risk warning
The prosperity of the employment industry repairs risks, the competition in the recruitment industry intensifies risks, third-party data risks, and the risk of careless data processing.
