Wellington, Aug 10 NZPA - Rising numbers of new job advertisements on the Seek website offer some hope of improving work opportunities after last week's shock surge in the unemployment rate.

Seek today said the number of new job ads on seek.co.nz rose by 6.3 percent in July, and were 45 percent higher than a year ago.

The Seek employment index -- the ratio of new job ads on the website to the number of applicants -- rose 5.2 percent in July, due to the number of new job ads racing ahead of application numbers.

Seek New Zealand general manager Annemarie Duff said the improvement in the index last month contributed to a 30 percent improvement since July 2009.

"Most importantly, this has been driven by strong growth in labour demand -- more jobs being listed in proportion to the numbers of applications per job is the outcome that most jobseekers desire," Ms Duff said.

The Seek figures for July were the first indicators for the September quarter and suggested more growth and a positive labour market may be ahead for the second half of 2010.

Data published by Statistics New Zealand last week put the unemployment rate at 6.8 percent in the June quarter, reversing most of a sharp fall to 6 percent for the March quarter.