According to the Monster Employment Index (MEI) Malaysia, which measures online job posting activities, there was an overall drop between April 2015 and April this year.
Furthermore, in April this year none of the job sectors and occupational groups witnessed any positive annual growth.
The freeze on hiring foreign workers earlier this year and the overall holding back of hiring activities by certain industries was also a factor in the drop, according to Monster.com managing director Sanjay Modi.
“Sectors affected were the construction, shipping and logistics sectors, where hiring numbers have been hit as reflected in the MEI data.
“Now that the ban on foreign workers is semi-lifted, we can expect companies to continue hiring in the months to come to cope with job demands,” he said in a statement, according to the local daily.
“Furthermore, with no additional hikes in oil prices, the oil and gas sector is likely to continue trimming its workforce until the market becomes well-adjusted to new oil prices,” he added.
The MEI data also showed an overall 4 per cent year-on-year drop in online hiring activity in the advertising, market research, public relations, media and entertainment sectors, noting that this was also the least among the other sectors monitored.
At the opposite end of the scale was the software, hardware and telecom job sector which reported the steepest year-on-year plunge, at 38 per cent.
Next was the logistic, courier/freight/transportation, shipping/marine sector which reported a plunge of 35 per cent year-on-year in online hiring activities.
There is a better outlook, however, when looking at the MEI for online hiring activity for the first four months of this year, which witnessed an improvement of 10 per cent between January and April, The Sun reported.
The MEI Malaysia is a monthly gauge of online job posting activity, based on a real-time review of millions of employer job opportunities, culled from a large representative selection of career websites and online job listings across Malaysia. The index does not reflect the trend of any one advertiser or source, but is an aggregate measure of the change in job listings across the industry.