OVI for June 2023: Labor demand in the first half of 2023 rises by 4.8 percent

July 14, 2023

After a mild decrease of the index in May, OVI index in June rose by 3.7 percent at the annual level. However, seasonally adjusted data show a slightly different picture. According to the data corrected for the seasonal impact, OVI index recorded a drop against the previous month in two consecutive months, May and June. It dropped by 2.5 percent in May, but in June it dropped by 6.2 percent, which is the biggest monthly index decrease since June 2022. The second quarter also registered a decrease of 1.5 percent, which is a very mild drop compared to, for example, the third quarter of last year when the index dropped by 5.8 percent. As explained in the previous months, the reason behind such index movements is probably the fact that seasonal hiring started earlier this year compared to previous years. As an additional argument, we emphasize that, in the first half of the year, the index rose by 6.6 percent compared to the previous six months and by 4.8 percent compared to the same period of 2022.

The most sought-after occupations have remained unchanged compared to June 2022 (salesperson, waiter, cook, warehouse worker, driver and bookkeeper) and have jointly generated, at the annual level, as much as a 2.9 percent growth in the number of job advertisements. The largest absolute decrease in the number of advertisements at the annual level in June was recorded for the occupations of programmer, information technology specialist, and designer, while the biggest increase was recorded for salesperson, clerk and warehouse worker. The share of advertisements requiring secondary level education is still on the rise, as is the number of advertisements offering permanent employment. The share of these advertisements increased in the past year by 6.7 percentage points, mostly at the expense of seasonal types of employment, the share of which dropped in June to 10.3 percent. With regard to geographical distribution of jobs, the number of advertisements dropped only in Dalmatian counties by 2.1 percent compared to June 2022, while central Croatia contributed to the growth of the overall number of advertisements with as much as 3.4 percentage points, owing mostly to the occupations of salesperson, warehouse worker and bookkeeper.

 

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.