OVI for October 2021: Good news from the labor market, more workers needed

November 3, 2021

Values of the latest OVI index continue to offer a reason for optimism. Labor demand has surpassed the 2020 and 2019 levels – OVI index for October 2021 shows that labor demand is around 39 percent higher than in October 2020 and around 9 percent higher compared to the pre-pandemic October 2019. This is the sixth consecutive month in which labor demand is higher than in pre-pandemic months. The most sought-after occupations in October this year were salesperson, waiter, teacher, cook and warehouse worker, while almost half of the advertised positions were for fixed-term employment. Moreover, the possibility to work from home is growing – the share of advertisements mentioning the option of work from home in October 2021 amounted to some 1.7 percent, which is only slightly lower than the maximum share of advertisements mentioning this option, which amounted to 1.9 percent in May 2021.
 

 

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.