OVI for August 2022: Continued favorable labor market movements

September 6, 2022

In August labor demand is traditionally lower than in previous months. However, the OVI index shows that labor demand was strong at the peak of summer, which is in line with the labor market movements in the last year and a half. When compared to the same month last year, the OVI index has been growing for 18 consecutive months. Compared to August 2021 and pre-pandemic August 2019, OVI for August 2022 shows stronger labor demand, by 10.2 and 32.5 percent, respectively. The most sought-after occupations were salesperson, waiter, cook, warehouse worker, and construction worker. The seventh most sought-after occupation was teacher, reflecting preparations for the new school year. Some 50 percent of advertisements were for fixed-term employment, while 42 percent of advertisements were for permanent employment. Advertisements mentioning the option of working from home are on the rise, accounting for 2.6 percent of total advertisements in August, while 4,1 percent of advertisements targeted pensioners.

 

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.