OVI for January 2020: Labor force demand stagnates, demand for pensioners stable at 1.3 percent of all advertisements

February 14, 2020

OVI index in January points to relatively similar labor demand levels as in previous periods, on the annual as well as the monthly level. Compared to January 2019, the index rose by 0.9 percent, while seasonally adjusted index values point to an increase of 0.1 percent compared to the previous month. This means that stagnation of labor demand measured in published online advertisements, that has been recorded for almost two years, is continuing. This is in line with movements of the overall economic activity which, according to the recent CEIZ index, has slowed down in the last quarter of 2019.

The most sought-after occupation, as in previous months, has been a sales person, which was demanded in 14.9 percent of published advertisements. It was followed by waiters and cooks, demanded in 5.6 percent of advertisements in January 2020. It should be emphasized that this difference between sales persons and waiters and cooks decreases just before the start of the tourist season. While the share of demand for sales persons has been stable at around 15 percent throughout the year in the past few years, demand for waiters and cooks, as expected, has a seasonal character and is growing stronger just before the start of the tourist season. Similar conclusions can be made when looking at permanent employment and fixed-term employment contracts. In January 2020, 42.9 percent of advertisements were for fixed-term employment, while 43.9 percent were for permanent employment. However, one should bear in mind that this is the consequence of the contracts’ seasonal character. Just before the start of the tourist season, the share of advertisements for fixed-term employment increases to 50 percent, while the share of contracts for permanent employment drops below 40 percent. Moreover, it is evident, from the published online advertisements, that the share of jobs that pensioners can apply for remains stable at 1.3 percent.
 
 

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.