OVI index
OVI for March 2025: Labor demand recovers in March
April 2, 2025
The OVI index recorded a drop on an annual level in all three months of the first quarter, with the decrease in February being the largest, amounting to -10.9 percent, while the decrease in March was the smallest and amounted to -2.9 percent compared to March last year. In the first three months of this year, the index thus fell by -5.9 percent compared to the same period last year, which is the biggest quarterly decrease in the last four years. However, according to seasonally adjusted data, the OVI index rose by 3.8 percent in March compared to the previous month, which points to a short-term improvement in the labor market, most likely associated with seasonal tourism employment.
Salesperson, cook, waiter, and warehouse worker are still the most sought-after occupations, the same as a year ago, the only difference being that bookkeepers have taken over fifth place instead of drivers. Of these five occupations, warehouse workers and bookkeepers recorded an increase in the number of job advertisements on an annual level and together contributed to OVI’s increase with 0.2 percentage points, while the top three occupations had a negative contribution of -3.5 percentage points. In the last year, job advertisements for cooks had the highest negative contribution to the index, with -1.5 percentage points, while job advertisements for professors and teachers had the highest positive contributions, together accounting for 1.3 percentage points. The largest increase in the number of job advertisements in absolute terms in March, compared to February, was recorded for salespersons, warehouse workers, waiters, cooks, and repair workers, which probably explains the index growth on a monthly level.
As in February, the share of advertisements seeking high levels of education increased significantly (from 19.2 to 24.2 percent), while the share of advertisements seeking low and secondary levels of education fell from 80.8 to 75.8 percent. In March, only advertisements offering permanent employment contributed positively to the total index, by 3.2 percentage points, while the number of advertisements offering fixed-term employment fell by -12.0 percent over the year.
The number of job advertisements rose slightly over the year in eastern Croatia, and by 3.1 percent in central Croatia, while it dropped in the Adriatic by a total of -8.3 percent. The biggest contribution to the increase in job advertisements in central Croatia came from advertisements for salespersons, teachers, professors, and clerks. If we compare the figures for the Adriatic counties with those for the month of February, we can deduce that the biggest increase in the number of job advertisements can be attributed to demand for waiters, cooks, drivers, repair workers, warehouse workers, and tourism 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.
Otvorena dozvola RH