site.btaJobTiger: Job Postings Fall 7.1% in July as Nearly All Sectors Decline

Job postings in Bulgaria fell by 7.1% month on month in July, JobTiger said in an analysis provided to BTA on Wednesday. Nearly every sector recorded a decline.

The total stood at 35,204, down by 2,697 from June. Year on year, postings fell by 10.6%, or 4,164, compared with July 2025.

JobTiger said its daily monitoring confirmed a gradual cooling of the labour market. Active listings decreased from 37,855 at the beginning of July to 35,204 at the end of the month, indicating that the decline accumulated throughout the period rather than resulting from a one-off removal of listings.

The largest monthly fall was in hotels and restaurants, which lost 958 listings, or 18%. A significant share of seasonal recruitment may already have been completed during the spring and early summer.

Manufacturing recorded 654 fewer postings, a decline of 9.1%. Company-wide August holidays and scheduled maintenance at some enterprises may have temporarily delayed new recruitment, although the data did not support attributing the decline solely to this factor.

Trade and sales lost 604 listings, or 6.5%. As manufacturing and trade are among the sectors offering the most jobs, changes in these areas strongly affected the overall result.

Only two categories moved against the broader trend. Listings increased by 9.1% in accounting, auditing and finance and by 3.5% in marketing and advertising.

Every monitored sector recorded fewer postings than in July 2025.

The largest percentage declines were in arts, down 40.2%, logistics and transport, down 38.2%, and construction, down 27.3%.

In absolute terms, logistics and transport lost 1,743 listings, while trade and sales lost 1,423. This distinction is important because a large percentage decline in a smaller sector does not necessarily have the greatest effect on the overall market.

IT listings fell by 25.4% year on year, equivalent to 697 fewer postings than in July 2025.

Trade and sales continued to account for the largest share of all listings, at around 25%. Manufacturing followed with 18.5%, hotels and restaurants with 12.4%, administrative and support services with 11.5%, logistics and transport with 8%, and IT with 5.8%.

Job postings across the six monitored regional capitals fell by a combined 5.9%. The steepest declines were in Stara Zagora, down 14.2%, and Ruse, down 10.8%. Listings decreased by 6.4% in Sofia, 5% in Plovdiv and 4.5% in Burgas.

Varna remained the most stable market, with a decline of only 0.5%. Seasonal demand along the Black Sea coast may have limited the fall, even though new listings in hotels and restaurants were already declining nationally.

The monitored platforms carried 2,389 listings for work-from-home or remote positions in July. Their number fell by only 1.3% from June, considerably more slowly than the overall market. Their share of all monitored listings consequently rose from 6.9% to 7.4%.

This did not mean that remote work was growing again. Its higher share in July mainly reflected the greater stability of its absolute number compared with the market as a whole.

The July data showed that the labour market was cooling, although the decline was uneven. Listings fell most sharply in some seasonal sectors and large-volume employment categories, while remote work remained relatively more resilient during the month. Year on year, however, every monitored category recorded a decline, including IT.

Activity will probably remain weaker in August because of holidays, reduced capacity at some enterprises and the completion of many seasonal recruitment campaigns.

September will be the more important test, as postponed recruitment processes usually resume then. A weaker-than-usual autumn recovery would offer a further indication that employers remain cautious about new hiring, the analysis said.

The July decline followed an 8% month on month fall in June, when listings also dropped by 15% year on year and every sector recorded a decrease.

In July 2025, job postings fell by 12% month on month, representing more than 5,000 fewer listings than in June, and declined by 7% year on year.