OVI for July 2024: Drop in the number of job advertisements in the first seven months
August 20, 2024
In July, the OVI index increased by 1.6 percent on an annual level, the highest since October 2023, after decreasing for five months and modestly increasing in June. Judging by the seasonally adjusted data and index movements compared to preceding months, a drop of -0.9 percent has been recorded in comparison to June, after the previous quarter in which the index stagnated compared to the first quarter of 2024. The beginning of the third quarter started with a decrease, and the growth rate of job advertisement numbers during the first seven months of 2024 compared to the first seven months of 2023 amounted to -3.2 percent, or -1.5 percent compared to the previous seven months. Although we are probably still dealing with changes in the employment patterns of workers in tourism activities, we should wait for the data for the remaining two months of the third quarter for a definite conclusion on the causes of the latest trends in the labor market.
The most sought-after occupations have remained the same compared to July 2023 (salesperson, warehouse worker, driver, waiter, cook, and bookkeeper), except that the cooks overtook waiters and ended up in fourth place. Combined, those six occupations generated almost three quarters of the total growth in the number of job advertisements on an annual level. In particular, salespersons and cooks stand out, with the number of their respective job advertisements increasing by as much as 40, or 38 percent in one year. In the same period, telecommunications staff recorded a significant decrease, as did production workers, construction workers, and mechanical engineers. The largest drop in demand on the list of the most sought-after occupations was recorded for brick layers, who fell from 26th place to 32nd place, while demand grew the most for the employees in finances, who advanced from 23rd place in July 2023 to 17th place in July 2024. The share of advertisements requiring secondary level education remained unchanged year-over-year, at 62 percent, while the share of advertisements requiring higher levels of education increased slightly at the expense of advertisements seeking employees with lower levels of qualifications. The trend of job advertisements offering fixed-term employment becoming replaced by job advertisements offering permanent employment continued in July, when the share of the latter increased to 50.7 percent.
The largest drop in the number of advertisements was recorded in the northern Adriatic region, with an annual rate of -15.8 percent and a negative contribution to the total number of advertisements of as much as -2.3 percentage points. The decrease in demand for medical doctors, salespersons, nurses and cleaning staff contributed the most to this drop. Among the job advertisements with a positive contribution, only the advertisements for hotel/hospitality staff stand out in the northern Adriatic region, with their number increasing by 25 percent on an annual level. Eastern Croatia recorded a more modest drop of -1.8 percent, while the remaining two regions, central Croatia and southern Adriatic, recorded an annual increase in the number of job advertisements of 3.5 and 17.1 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 2020).
The index is to be interpreted in such a way that the values greater than 100 represent growth when compared to 2020, and accordingly, that the values less than 100 represent a decrease with respect to the base year. The index is seasonally adjusted using the X-12-ARIMA method.