More jobs are being advertised but it won't be enough to stem Australia's rising unemployment rate, economists say.
Job ads haven risen for the seventh month in a row, rising 1.8 per cent in December and 11.4 per cent for the year, according to the ANZ Job Ads survey on Monday.
Although job ads were growing at a brisk rate compared to the previous few years, new opportunities were not keeping up with the rise in unemployment, said Scutt Partners market strategist David Scutt.
"You've got a whole lot of people exiting university, exiting school, that are looking for jobs and when the economy is not growing at a very fast rate, there's simply not enough jobs being created for those people to be absorbed into the labour market," Mr Scutt said.
"We're seeing that a lot in the youth unemployment statistics that are showing multi-decade highs at this point in time."
ANZ chief economist Warren Hogan said new job opportunities were not keeping up with the number of new entrants to the workforce or job losses in certain sectors.
Soft labour market conditions would cap wage increases, he said, and along with declining oil prices, could feed through to subdued inflation this year.
Mr Hogan said ANZ would await consumer confidence and jobs figures due to be released this week to ascertain the likelihood of another Reserve Bank cash rate cut to help the economy along.
"Right now, we think the best course of action is for the RBA to maintain a steady hand on interest rates," he said.
"But with global energy costs falling substantially, and inflation likely to be lower than previously thought, there is increasing scope for Australian interest rates to fall a little over the first half of 2015."
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