OVI for August 2021: Labor demand continues to recover, exceeding pre-pandemic levels

September 3, 2021

OVI’s latest values are in line with other positive economic indicators published in the last few weeks. Labor demand has exceeded its 2020 and 2019 levels – OVI for August 2021 shows that labor demand is 60 percent higher than in August 2020, and around 20 percent higher compared to the pre-pandemic August of 2019. When comparing labor demand levels in 2021 and 2019, this is the fourth consecutive month in which labor demand is higher than in the pre-pandemic months, which is a strong indicator of labor market recovery. Demand for the three traditionally most sought-after occupations – salesperson, waiter, and cook – is also higher compared to August 2019 and 2020, with drivers and construction workers also high in demand. Interestingly, the share of job advertisements mentioning working from home has risen to about 1.5 to 2 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, while before the pandemic working from home was mentioned in less than 0.25 percent of job advertisements.

 

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.