OVI for March 2022: Strong labor demand continues

April 1, 2022

Positive trends on the labor market continue. According to the OVI index for March 2022, labor demand is 33 percent higher compared to March 2021, and 65 and 27 percent higher than in March 2020 and March 2019 respectively. A similar conclusion can be drawn from quarterly data: in the first quarter of 2022, labor demand was 58, 45 and 30 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2021, 2020 and 2019 respectively. The most sought after occupations in March this year were salesperson, cook, waiter, warehouse worker and driver. 44 percent of job advertisements offered permanent employment, while 43 percent of advertisements offered fixed term employment. Some 1.8 percent of advertisements mentioned the possibility of working from home, while 3.2 percent of advertisements targeted pensioners.
 

 

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.