Take a guess: how long does it take on average to find a job once you have officially become unemployed? In France, unemployed people registered with the unemployment agency Pôle emploi stay without a job for 359 days, a new research indicator by the public body shows.

This research has been newly launched to indicate “the impact of the economic conditions on the labour market”, the agency said yesterday – and the results are worrying.

In the first quarter of 2007, the lowest level could be registered with unemployed people waiting on average 7 and a half months before finding a new job. This increased drastically to 12 months in the aftermath of the recession in the second quarter of 2009, before reaching a new peak in the fourth quarter of 2011 where unemployed people waited on average 359 days before finding employment.

The research also shows that between the second quarters of 2008 to 2009, a quarter of temporary jobs alone (170,000) were axed. The agency reported that the economic crisis had a bigger impact on women than on men but skilled workers had also been badly affected. It warned that the persistence of high unemployment has not decreased over the past years.

Analysts expect the French unemployment rate to rise to 10.3% by the end of the year from 10% in the first quarter of 2012 with the economy to remain sluggish.