OVI for June 2019: Only one percent of job advertisements for pensioners

July 2, 2019

According to the seasonally adjusted data, OVI index cumulatively rose, in the first four months of 2019, by 10.2 percent compared to the end of 2018. However, a decrease on the monthly level was recorded in both May and June, which amounted to -2.7 percent in June compared to the previous month, and -8.7 percent on an annual level. In the first half of 2019, compared to the same period last year, the number of job advertisements was lower by 0.8 percent, which points to a mild drop in labor demand. Considering the fact that available macroeconomic data for April, that were used to calculate the CEIZ index, predict significant acceleration in the annual growth rate of real GDP in the second quarter, available information on labor demand for the entire second quarter suggest that acceleration of economic growth mildly slowed down towards the end of the quarter. This means that GDP growth rate could be somewhat lower than announced.

The highest increase in the number of job advertisements on an annual level was recorded for professions of warehouse workers, hospitality staff, designers and hairdressers, while the biggest decrease was recorded for drivers, cooks, auto-mechanics and construction workers. Compared to June 2018, there is a mild drop in the number of advertisements requiring secondary level of education, while the share of advertisements offering permanent employment simultaneously rose. When it comes to geographical distribution of jobs, the biggest number of advertisements was for jobs in central Croatia which had, in June, the lowest negative share in the overall drop of the number of advertisements on an annual level. Although the majority of advertisements published in June did not require work experience, those advertisements that did require it usually asked for no more than 5 years of work experience. A similar situation can be seen in advertisements in which employers also stated pensioners as potential employees. A very small number of such advertisements has been recorded, only one percent of the overall number of advertisements, while the highest demand in these advertisements was for drivers or deliverymen, followed by sales assistants and nurses. 
 

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.