OVI for May 2022: Strong labor demand, preparations for the tourist season continue
June 7, 2022
OVI index for May, when compared to the same month last year, has been continuously growing for the past 15 months. It can, thus, be concluded that the current labor demand is significantly higher than in the pre-pandemic period. According to the OVI index for May 2022, labor demand is 43 percent higher than in May 2021, but also 25 percent higher than in pre-pandemic May 2019. Seasonally adjusted data for May show that this is a 7 percent growth compared to seasonally adjusted index data for April 2022. As in the previous month, these positive movements are the result of preparations for the upcoming tourist season. The most sought after occupations were salesperson, waiter and cook, while some 16 percent of advertisements were for seasonal jobs, which is above the annual average. Some 44 percent of advertisements were for fixed-term employment, while 40 percent of advertisements were for permanent employment. Around 1.5 percent of advertisements mentioned the option of working from home, while 2.9 percent of advertisements targeted pensioners.
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.