A SOUTH Essex town has been named the hardest place to land a job outside of London with one of the most competitive job markets in the country.

The UK's job market has been up and down since the Covid pandemic.

Earlier this month, the Office for National Statistics said the unemployment rate jumped to 4.2 per cent in the three months to February – the highest level for nearly six months.

The official figures also showed regular wages growth, excluding bonuses, falling back once again, to 6 per cent in the three months to February from 6.1 per cent in the previous three months.

Thanks to falling inflation, when taking the Consumer Prices Index into account, real regular wages rose by 2.1 per cent, which is the highest for almost two-and-a-half years.

To get a better idea of how competitive the UK job market is right now, Resume.io zeroed in on which towns and cities get the most and least applicants per job*.

Methodology behind the study

To find out which are the most competitive job markets in the UK, the resume writer looked at data from LinkedIn Jobs in different locations and industries.

The team filtered jobs to ensure they were posted during the last month and were not remote positions.

They pulled a sample from every UK town or city with an above 50,000 population.

For each job, they recorded the number of days the listing had been live, the number of
applicants and the industry.

This allowed them to rank cities and industries based on the average daily applicants per job listing.

Basildon named as most competitive job market

Perhaps unsurprisingly, London has the most competitive job market in the UK, with 11.01 applicants per job per day.

Outside of the capital, Basildon was the hardest to land a job with 5.32 average daily applicants per job - significantly less competition than London.

On the other end of the table, Southend has the 9th least competitive job market in the UK with 0.14 average daily applicants per job.

Amanda Augustine, resident career expert for Resume.io, said: “While it’s no surprise to learn that London is home to the most competitive job market in the UK, I was surprised to see how sharp of a drop-off in competition there is between London and the second-
most competitive town, Basildon — more than 50 per cent!

“If jobseekers wish to live in a city centre and face significantly less competition for work, I strongly recommend looking for vacancies that suit one’s needs outside of London.”

*The data is correct as of February 2024