OVI for 2022: Significant growth of job advertisements offering fixed-term contracts

January 4, 2023

Compared to 2021, OVI recorded a growth of 26 percent, which testifies of continued strong increase in labor demand. Compared to pre-crisis 2019, the overall number of advertisements in 2022 was higher by almost a third or 32.3 percent, pointing to the fact that demand on the Croatian labor market is on its record high levels.

As in previous years, advertisements seeking workers with lower qualifications, as well as those for workers with secondary level education, made the biggest contribution to the annual growth of demand, while demand for workers with high degree education grew at the rate of 12.1 percent and contributed in the increase of the overall number of advertisements with only 2.4 percentage points. This is backed by information on five most sought-after occupations which included salesperson, waiter, cook, warehouse worker and bookkeeper, which climbed, compared to 2021, from the sixth to the fifth place replacing the occupation of a driver. The biggest contribution to the overall increase in labor demand was made by advertisements seeking salespersons, warehouse workers, bookkeepers, waiters, hotel/hospitality staff and clerks, while advertisements for programmers, construction workers, carpenters and brick layers made rare negative contributions.

An increase in the number of contracts for fixed-term employment, compared to contracts for permanent employment, was registered in 2022. This resulted in the number of contracts offering fixed-term employment remaining almost unchanged by decreasing from 46.2 percent to 46.1 percent of all job advertisements, but the number of job advertisements offering contracts for permanent employment registered a decrease and reached 43.7 percent of all job advertisements, compared to 44.0 percent in 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.