The table illustrates how the difficulty of staff recruitment in four sectors namely manufacturing, building, commerce and services changed between 2003 and 2004.
Overall, recruiting skilled workers was the hardest in all these sectors, while that of technical and manaderial staff had little difficulty. Notably, the difficulty rate of employing workers generally increased over the period, except for the commerce sector, whereas the figures for staff showed a decrease.
In terms of workers recruitment, commerce had the highest rate of difficulty in finding skilled workers in 2003, at 47%, followed by 45% of manufacturing. By 2004, the difficulty rate in manufacturing increased to 51%, while that of commerce decline to 41%. Likewise, employing unskilled workers in these sectors followed the same pattern, rising from 26% in 2003 to 28% in 2004 for manufacturing and dropping from 22% to 19% for commerce. During the same period, building and services had relatively similar rates in recruiting skilled workers, at around 42% in 2003 and 45% in 2004. Meanwhile, the figures for unskilled workers represented 21% in building and 20% in services, before increasing to 23% and 29%, respectively.
Turning to technical and managerial staff, the difficulty rate witnessed a decreasing pattern. Starting at 14%, the difficulty in staff recruitment in the building sector was the highest among all the four sectors, despite its fall to 10% in 2004. The difficulty rate in manufacturing stood at 8% in 2003, followed by services at 5% and fourfold the figure for commerce at 2%. After one year, the figure for manufacturing declined slightly to 6%, while that of services dropped by half and commerce showed no difficulty.