OVI for June 2018: The beginning of summer brings a decline in labor demand

In June 2018, OVI recorded a 25.2 percent growth rate compared to the same month in 2017, while seasonally adjusted index values indicate a mild decline in labor demand of -3.3 percent on a monthly level. As tourism facilities seem to have been quite full at the start of the summer, the decrease in labor demand compared to May is not unexpected. Although the labor demand growth trend has slowed down in June, OVI was 35 percent higher in the first half of 2018 compared to the same period last year.
 
As in 2017, job advertisements in the first six months of 2018 were predominantly posted for sales assistants, waiters, cooks, and drivers, while accountants replaced programmers in fifth place. These five most sought-after occupations accounted for just above 37 percent of all job advertisements posted from January to June 2018. As for level of education, more than a third of job advertisements posted in the first half of 2018 required secondary level of education, while higher and high degree of education was only required in just above 15 percent of all job advertisements. With regard to type of contract, fixed-term employment still predominates, accounting for 48 percent of contracts, while occasional and seasonal employment accounted for 12 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.