Finds new BIDS study analysing 547 weeks of online job portal data

Competition for each job vacancy in Bangladesh’s formal market has surged nearly 66 percent since the Covid-19 pandemic, a study by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) has found.

The study report shows that 287 applicants now compete for every job vacancy, up from 173 before the pandemic, as local and global disruptions squeeze recruitment further.

The findings draw on data from one of the country’s largest online job portals, spanning 547 weeks between June 2015 and December 2025. Prof Atonu Rabbani, research director at BIDS, presented the report at a Dhaka seminar yesterday.

The study examined job advertisements, vacancies, application rates, and labour market tightness, and assessed the effects of major economic shocks, including the pandemic and shifts in Bangladesh Bank’s repo rate.

Over the period, the platform logged an average of 1,154 weekly job advertisements, 3,646 vacancies, and nearly 697,000 applications every week.

The pandemic dealt an unprecedented blow to the country’s labour market, the study noted. Between March and June of 2020, when the government imposed nationwide lockdowns, job advertisements dropped 70.2 percent and vacancies fell 75.2 percent.

Applications fell too, but by a smaller margin of 59.1 percent. Meaning, the pool of job seekers shrank far less than the demand for workers. That gap pushed applications per vacancy to 287.3.

The contraction in vacancies was sharper than in the United States, where openings fell by around 40 percent, and comparable to the UK, where vacancies dropped 60 to 70 percent.

Hiring recovered gradually after the pandemic, though labour market conditions stayed unusually tight.

“The labour market tightness metric tells us how many people are competing for every available position,” Atonu said, adding that higher figures signal a tougher market for job seekers.

The report states that online recruitment data can give policymakers much earlier signals of economic distress than conventional labour force surveys.

It noted that official Labour Force Surveys run quarterly or less often and are typically released months later, while job portal data update continuously, letting policymakers catch sudden shocks almost in real time.

Even so, portal data should complement rather than replace official surveys, Atonu cautioned, since it mainly captures the formal, urban, and digitally connected workforce.

The Covid-19 lockdown sharply intensified job competition, with the effects lingering for around 9.5 months — considerably longer than in many advanced economies that rolled out extensive employment protection measures, the study found.

Repo rate changes, meanwhile, left little lasting mark on hiring. Job postings dipped briefly after rate hikes, but the effect faded within a week, suggesting monetary policy exerts only a limited, indirect pull on employers’ recruitment decisions.

Atonu recommended that the government fold high-frequency labour market indicators into its economic monitoring framework to flag emerging risks before they surface in official statistics.

Real-time recruitment data should join traditional labour force surveys in the Ministry of Planning’s regular monitoring toolkit, enabling faster policy responses during periods of economic stress, he said.

Prof AK Enamul Haque, director general of BIDS, said the labour market has yet to fully recover from the pandemic’s disruptions, with signs of weakness persisting through the second half of 2025.

The professor noted that employment was one of the key issues behind the July Uprising in 2024, stressing the need for further analysis to understand how the job market has evolved since then.

According to him, the study is the first in Bangladesh to analyse short-term labour market trends using online job platform data — an approach he said could help policymakers track labour market shifts more closely.

Also speaking at the event, Zonayed Saki, state minister for planning, said the government inherited a fragile economy and is focusing on boosting investment, production and employment, encouraging investment in both traditional sectors such as garments and pharmaceuticals and emerging industries including ICT, electronics, semiconductors and light engineering.

He noted that the energy crisis remains a major challenge, saying Bangladesh has adopted policies to become more self-reliant but still depends heavily on global market conditions.