OVI for September 2024: Labor demand drops in the first nine months

October 2, 2024

In September, the OVI index fell by -4.5 percent on an annual level, which is the biggest drop since April of this year and represents the second month in a row that the index has been falling. However, the seasonally adjusted index value recorded a growth compared to August, by 2.3 percent, which is the biggest monthly increase since February. Nevertheless, as the index fell on a monthly level in July and August, the third quarter ended in the red, by -2.3 percent compared to the same period last year, and with a -0.6 percent decrease compared to the second quarter. Judging by the first nine months of this year, the OVI index has dropped by -3.4 percent compared to the same period in 2023. Compared to the previous nine months, the situation is somewhat more favorable because seasonally adjusted data indicate a drop of -2.4 percent.

Compared to September 2023, the occupations of salesperson, waiter, warehouse worker, and teacher remained among the five most sought-after occupations, but bookkeepers pushed out cooks and came in fifth on the list. The largest drop among the most-sought after occupations was recorded for telecommunications staff and production workers, who fell from 17th to 25th place, and from 9th to 17th place, respectively. At the same time, the biggest climb on the list of most sought-after occupations was recorded by pharmacists and professors, who jumped from 29th place last year to 22nd this year, and from 33rd place last year to 26th place in September 2024, respectively. The biggest contribution to the job advertisement growth rate came from advertisements for bookkeepers and salespersons, while the largest negative contribution came from advertisements for teachers and production workers.

The largest negative contribution to the job advertisement growth rate came from advertisements requiring low level education, as much as -3.0 percentage points. A drop in demand was largely noted for the occupations of warehouse worker, brick layer and construction worker. Job advertisements requiring secondary level education also had a negative contribution, of -0.8 percentage points, and only advertisements seeking higher levels of education had a positive contribution to the growth rate with 0.4 percentage points. In September, the regions of eastern Croatia and northern Adriatic recorded an increase in the number of job advertisements on an annual level, by 0.9 percent for the northern Adriatic and 5.3 percent for eastern Croatia. The southern Adriatic region recorded a drop of -1.5 percent, and central Croatia of -2.8 percent, which due to the large number of job advertisements led to the biggest negative contribution to the growth rate of the total number of job advertisements, amounting to -1.7 percentage points. The drop in demand in central Croatia can be mostly attributed to the drop in demand for teachers and production workers.

 

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 2020). 

The index is to be interpreted in such a way that the values greater than 100 represent growth when compared to 2020, and accordingly, that the values less than 100 represent a decrease with respect to the base year. The index is seasonally adjusted using the X-12-ARIMA method.