"We have seen strengthening in full-time growth over recent months, following falls in full-time employment recorded through much of 2016," the acting general manager of Australian Bureau of Statistics' macroeconomic statistics, Jacqui Jones said.

The data appears to match trends in the biennial earnings and hours data released in January that showed contrary to ABS labour force statistics, part-time jobs had not increased and were even falling.

Over the year, seasonally adjusted full-time employment has increased by 67,800 and part-time employment has increased by 78,100, the bureau said. On a trend basis, part-time employment has increased from 31.4 per cent to 31.9 per cent of total employment since March 2016.

However, Capital chief economist Paul Dales said the surge in employment didn't fit with soft economic activity at the start of the year and "needs to be taken with a shovel of salt".

"It's the biggest absolute change since October 2015. On that occasion, the Australian Bureau of Statistics had problems with its survey sample."

He said his suspicions about the data were supported by the large 65,000 increase in the size of the labour force which pushed up the participation rate.

"In other words, it seems that the ABS discovered there were a lot more people in the labour force in March, and the share that were unemployed happened to be the same as before."

He said he would put much more stock in the unemployment rate, which is at a 14-month high.

"Overall, the surge in employment in March won't ease the Reserve Bank of Australia's concerns about the soft labour market. And our forecast that the unemployment rate will stay close to 6 per cent for most of this year means those concerns will linger for a while yet."

CommSec chief economist Craig James said the seasonal figures were volatile and pointed to the trend figure of a 16,500 rise in employment as a better indicator.

"If the figures are taken at face value then Australia posted the largest back-to-back gain in full-time jobs in 29 years. That sort of job growth is hard to reconcile with other data."