The Online Vacancy Index (OVI) has shown for the fifth month in a row that labour demand has surpassed the pre-pandemic level, as confirmed by data for September when labour demand increased by 11% compared with September 2019, the Zagreb Institute of Economics (EIZ) reported on its website on Wednesday.

The latest OVI index, and other economic indicators over the past months provide room for optimism, EIZ said.

Labour demand in the third quarter of this year increased by about 57% compared to Q3 2020 and by about 19% compared to Q3 2019. Labour demand in the first nine months of 2021 was about 1% higher than in the first nine months of 2019, EIZ said.

The OVI is a monthly index of online job advertisements developed by the EIZ in cooperation with the MojPosao job search website. The index aims to provide timely information on current labour demand.

The OVI 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).