OVI for April 2018: Growth in labor demand; increased demand for cooks, waiters and sales assistants

In April 2018, OVI recorded a 57.6 percent growth rate compared to the same month last year, indicating a strong growth in labor demand on an annual level. Compared to the month before, seasonally adjusted values point to the same conclusion, as the seasonally adjusted index rose by 7.7 percent in April, which is the fourth largest growth in the last 12 months. These positive trends, pointing to the upcoming tourist season, are apparent throughout the country. Growth in labor demand for jobs in the service sector is another indication that it will be a successful tourist season. Demand for these occupations, primarily cooks, waiters and sales assistants, has grown by more than 50 percent compared to April 2017. When it comes to type of employment contract, demand for student and seasonal jobs has recorded the highest growth, rising by 82.7 percent compared to April of last year, followed by fixed-term and permanent employment which grew by 62.1 and 47.4 percent, respectively, while the number of job advertisements related to occupational training without commencing employment rose by 30.7 percent compared to April 2017.

 

What is OVI?

Online Vacancy Index (OVI) is a monthly index of online job advertisements developed by the Institute of Economics, Zagreb in cooperation with the web portal MojPosao. The index aims to provide timely information regarding current labor demands. OVI index is developed by means of simple enumeration of single new job advertisements whose application deadlines end within the same month for which the index is being calculated. Given that advertisements published by only one web portal are taken into account, the number of job advertisements is expressed as an index (with the base year being 2015). 

The index is to be interpreted in such a way that the values greater than 100 represent growth when compared to 2015, and accordingly, that the values less than 100 represent a decrease with respect to the base year. Index is seasonally adjusted using the X-12-ARIMA method.