OVI for November 2017: Labor demand grows, but at a slightly slower pace

In November 2017, the OVI index registered a 38.2 percent growth when compared to the same month of the previous year, indicating a continuation of strong labor demand growth. Seasonally adjusted index values point to a slightly slower growth pace as the seasonally adjusted index fell by 1.4 percent, which is the third largest drop this year (after April and September). Nevertheless, due to favorable index movements in most of the months this year, the total number of job advertisements in the first eleven months of 2017 was 33.7 percent higher compared to the same period last year. Favorable developments in the labor market in the last couple of years have resulted in the current OVI index being 13.4 percent higher than the peak pre-crisis level recorded in June 2007.
 

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 a such 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.