OVI for January 2022: The year starts with strong labor demand, demand in January a quarter higher than before the pandemic

February 7, 2022

The new year is starting with good news from the labor market because a strong labor demand, in line with trends in the past few months, is still being recorded, despite the pandemic challenges and high numbers of people infected with the coronavirus. According to OVI index in January 2022, labor demand is 91 percent higher than in January 2021. It should, however, be kept in mind that labor demand in January 2021 was limited due to economic and social restrictions imposed with the goal of containing the pandemic. When the demand today is compared with the pre-pandemic periods, it can be concluded that labor demand is 27 and 28 percent higher than in January 2020 and January 2019 respectively. The most sought-after occupations in January this year were salesperson, cook, waiter, warehouse worker and bookkeeper. 45 percent of job advertisements offered contracts for permanent employment, while 46 percent of advertisements offered contracts for fixed-term employment. Some 2.3 percent of advertisements mentioned the option of working from home, which is higher than in previous months. 2.9 percent of advertisements targeted pensioners, which is in line with the trend of higher demand for pensioners in the past months.
 

 

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.