An increasingly cloudy economic outlook has the potential to knock the Canadian labour market off of its strong pandemic recovery. However, so far this summer Canadians remain sanguine about their job finding prospects. 

This July, 51% of respondents to our Indeed Canada Job Search Survey who were actively looking for work, indicated they were at least somewhat confident they could find a new job within the next month. This share was down a tad from April, but broadly in line with the rest of the first half of the year. The confidence rate was also up 8 percentage points from 43% a year earlier (a statistically significant increase), with improvement among both employed and unemployed job seekers. 

Line graph titled “Job seeker confidence held steady in July.”
Line graph titled “Job seeker confidence held steady in July.” With a vertical axis ranging from 25% to 65%, Indeed tracked the share of job seekers confident they can find a job in the next month by employment status between July 2021 and July 2022 with different coloured lines representing employed, not employed, and total. As of July 2022, 51% of respondents who were actively searching for work either agreed or strongly agreed that they were confident they “can find a new job in the next month,” up from 43% a year earlier. 

Solid job search confidence suggests that broader economic jitters haven’t yet filtered into psychology in the Canadian labour market. This is consistent with recent Indeed job postings, which have cooled from their early-May peak, but as of July 22nd, remained up 65% from their pre-pandemic level. Economic downturns tend to hit employment not only through rising layoffs, but also slower hiring. Those on the job hunt remain relatively confident for now. The trajectory over the second half of the year is less certain. 

Methodology

This blog post is based on separate online surveys of 4,000 Canadian adults ages 18-64 conducted July 15-20, August 9-23, September 13-29, October 11-20, November 8-25, December 6-29, January 10-26, February 7-22, March 7-23, April 11-26, May 9-24, June 13-25, July 11-25, and. The survey was conducted among various general population survey panel audiences. Awareness, use, or other relationship with Indeed was not a requirement for participation. There was no mention of Indeed or any other job sites in the survey and respondents were not aware that the survey was sponsored by Indeed. 

Weights were applied to match respondent distributions across age, educational attainment, and time spent in Canada with the Labour Force Survey public use microfile data from January 2021 through June 2021.