A sign of the good health of the job market. In April, a record number of permanent hires was recorded in France, according to Urssaf figures. Precisely 421,400 declarations of employment on a permanent contract were signed over the month. That is a number never seen since at least 2006, the year in which Urssaf began to take a census of them every month.
Over one month, the increase was 1.9%. It is 6% over one quarter, and reaches nearly 40% over one year. Compared to their pre-pandemic level, in February 2020, hirings on permanent contracts are 12.1% higher. By adding fixed-term contracts of more than one month, we arrive at the also very high figure of 812,192 hires (0.3% over one month, 40.4% over one year). Not a record level, however, since it had reached, for example, 828,000 in June 2021.
These data show that France continues to hire, despite the shock of the war in Ukraine, which has severely affected the French economy, as evidenced by the zero growth recorded in France in the first quarter according to INSEE. If we are to believe the job offers available on the Pôle emploi site (over 1.1 million), the positive trend in hiring could continue in the coming months.
For its part, the unemployment rate is also at a historically low level: 7.3% in the first quarter according to INSEE. Or “its lowest level since the beginning of 2008, if we except the one-time drop in “trompe-l’œil” in the spring of 2020, during the first confinement”, explains the institute of statistics.
This paradox of stalled growth and a still dynamic job market can be explained, according to Mathieu Plane, deputy director of the analysis and forecasting department of the OFCE, in particular by the fact that “companies, faced with difficulties in finding qualified labor and constraints in the organization of work, prefer to keep their workforce” when the clouds are rising. The question is to know how long this paradox can last with the deterioration of the international situation. If its magnitude is not significant, the very slight increase in the number of unemployed jobseekers in April (9,300) can be seen as a warning.
