Title page
Contents
Acknowledgements 6
Executive summary 7
1. Introduction 9
Workers increasingly use online tools in their job search 9
Online job searching provides a new data source for labour market analysis 11
2. Data and methodology 12
Lightcast online job postings data 12
Eurostat data 12
National sources 13
Job postings, open vacancies and surveys 14
Methodology 15
3. Results 16
The coverage of Lightcast data across countries and time 16
The coverage of Lightcast data across subnational regions 19
Sectoral coverage 21
Occupational coverage 23
Conditional correlations for multi-dimensional vacancy counts 25
Discussion and conclusion 29
References 31
Annex A. National sources and matching data dimensions 33
Table 1. Overview of vacancy data from national statistical sources used in this paper 13
Table 2. Three sources, three ways to count vacancies 14
Table 3. Sectors according to NACE classification 21
Table 4. ISCO occupations 23
Table 5. A national source vacancy equals between 0.12 to 9.8 vacancies in Lightcast 26
Table 6. At higher levels of aggregation of occupations, Lightcast and national sources correlate more 27
Figure 1. Using internet for job applications is increasing across most EU countries 10
Figure 2. Lightcast online job postings rise rapidly between 2018 and 2019 for many countries 16
Figure 3. Lightcast and Eurostat do not have equal distributions across countries 17
Figure 4. Interpretation of the bar graphs 18
Figure 5. The number of online job postings relative to national sources varies across regions for most countries 20
Figure 6. Sectoral distributions of vacancies between online job postings and national sources 22
Figure 7. The ratio of online job postings over aggregate EU vacancies across sectors varies over time and sector 23
Figure 8. Occupational distributions of vacancies between Lightcast and national sources 24
Boxes
Box 1. A visual method to compare how Lightcast vacancies compare to other sources across groups and time 18
Box 2. Regression analysis of vacancies numbers 25
Annex Tables
Table A A.1. Austrian occupation classification 33
Table A A.2. Occupation classification for Austria 33
Table A A.3. Portugal's sector classification 34