OVI for September 2022: Labor demand continues

October 3, 2022

In line with labor market movements in the past year and a half, OVI index shows that labor demand in September this year has remained strong. Compared to September 2021 and September of the pre-pandemic 2019, labor demand in September 2022 increased by 13.7 percent and 26.6 percent respectively. A similar conclusion can be drawn from quarterly data: in the third quarter of 2022, labor demand increased by 9.9 and 31.2 percent compared to the third quarter in 2021 and 2019 respectively. The most sought-after occupations in September this year were salesperson, waiter, teacher, warehouse worker and accountant. 48.5 percent of job advertisements offered fixed-term employment, while 42 percent offered permanent employment.  

An increase in the number of job advertisement mentioning the possibility of working from home can also be noticed. The number of such advertisements increased from 1.7 percent in September 2021 to 2.5 percent in September 2022. A similar growth trend is also present with job advertisements targeting pensioners. These advertisements rose to 3 percent in September this year from 2.5 percent in September 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.