In a urHired.ie survey of 100 employers carried out by Focus One, 54% of employers said they noticed a significant increase in the number of CVs being sent to them in the first half of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007.

Speaking at the launch of the website today Henry Fleming, Director of urHired said, "With the current economic situation it is not surprising that people are being forced to fight for jobs. Over the last few years people were picking and choosing companies to send their CVs to.

"We now have a situation where seekers are feeling the squeeze and are facing much stiffer competition for vacancies. At the same time as people are fighting for jobs we're seeing employers cutting recruitment costs. We see this as our advantage, as employers can recruit with urHired.ie free of charge," he added.

The competition for places is expected to get significantly worse as the usual big milk-round employers, like the banks and professional services firms, cut back on graduate recruitment. "We're expecting a 60% downturn in the amount of graduates recruited in the milk-round which means qualified professionals who last year would have walked into a job will now find themselves without any offers," said Fleming.

Most of the employers surveyed said that they had seen increases in job applications of between 50% and 100% in the last twelve months. This is exacerbated by the fact that nearly half of the companies surveyed said that they were cutting back on the amount of new staff they would hire from 2007.

"Even more worrying," continued Fleming, "than the fact that there's more people applying for fewer jobs is the fact that the urHired survey showed that one in five companies said they were likely to make people redundant in the next twelve months."

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