The number of jobs advertised in Australia increased by 9.3% during July 2015, compared with the same month last year, according to the latest figures from ANZ Bank’s job advert survey.

The latest growth was a below the 10.8% increase reported in June and the 14.1% increase in May; however, it should be noted that May reported the strongest increase for more than two years.

The number of job adverts has increased every month since June 2014, when compared with the same month the previous year.

On a month-on-month basis, however, the ANZ survey reported its first decline since March 2015, with a decrease of 0.4%.

Warren Hogan, Chief Economist at ANZ, commented: “The small decline in job advertising in July comes after growth in job ads had been slowing for some time. While job ads were around 9% higher over the year to July, they were just 3.6% higher in annualised terms over the most recent three months.”

“The slower growth in job advertising supports our view that employment growth will slow in the second half of 2015 following unexpectedly strong outcomes since late 2014. Importantly, despite that strong jobs growth, aggregate household income has expanded only modestly as the large number of services jobs being generated are paid significantly less than the jobs lost in the mining and manufacturing industries.”

“As a result, growth in household spending has remained sluggish. While it still could take some time to get clarity on underlying labour market trends, subdued household income and spending growth will remain a headwind to overall economic activity and hiring. July’s official employment figures are out this Thursday. We expect employment to increase (by 15,000) and the unemployment rate to remain unchanged at 6%,” Mr Hogan concluded.