A fall in the number of job advertisements - outside Canterbury at least - suggest a "fairly tepid" labour market, ANZ says.
Its job ads series, which adds together newspaper and internet advertisements, fell 1 per cent last month after a 4.6 per cent jump in February.
Its preferred composite series, which gives a higher weighting to newspaper ads to provide a better indicator of the unemployment rate, fell 3.6 per cent.
That indicator had been on a declining trend since the middle of last year, suggesting a fairly tepid labour market, ANZ economist Sharon Zollner said.
The unemployment rate might fall a bit further in the near term, but any improvement would be shortlived, she said.
