5 July 2022 - Due to the coronavirus crisis, the demand for data describing the current economic situation that are early available has sharply increased. As regards the labour market, the use of job advertisements published on the internet can make a significant contribution here. For some time now, the Federal Statistical Office has been working to develop indicators based on job ads of job portals in order to monitor the development of labour demand in online job markets.
In the context of EU projects, the Federal Statistical Office uses the data collections of the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP) for that purpose. These CEDEFOP data are collected daily but can be provided only quarterly at the time being as data processing is very complex. The Federal Statistical Office calculates a monthly online job index from these job advertisements collected on a daily basis. The calculation involves further adjustment and adaptation processes. For example, only a selection of five major job portals from the CEDEFOP dataset are used. For a detailed description of how the data quality is evaluated and how the online job index is determined please refer to the article entitled "Impact of the coronavirus crisis on the labour market: experimental statistics based on data from online job portals" (WISTA 3/2021).
The Federal Statistical Office is also in close contact with external experts whose research focuses on the analysis potential of online job advertisements as well. In November 2021, the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training hosted a forum together with the Bertelsmann Stiftung where the Federal Statistical Office as a participant presented findings on quality assurance regarding data from online job portals. A video of the contribution on "Qualitätssicherung durch Struktur- und Outputanalyse" (Quality assurance by structural and output analysis - available in German only) and other information about the event are provided in this education and training blog of the Bertelsmann Stiftung.
CEDEFOP data of version V9 provide information on the period from July 2018 to December 2020. Versions V12 and V14 supply updated data until June 2021 and December 2021, respectively. Updated versions include retrospective revisions.
Online job advertisements for internships were excluded in all versions where possible. Please note that it is not clear in some cases whether a job advertisement is for an internship or not. The proportion of such unclear job ads increased from a previous average of 30% first to over 50% for reference year 2020 and then to even more than 95% from the middle of 2020.
In the past, the Federal Statistical Office selected five job portals from the CEDEFOP data: Arbeitsagentur, XING, StepStone, Adzuna and DE_Jobbörse. In version V14, data availability from these portals was insufficient. For example, the proportion of job advertisements obtained from the Adzuna job portal was down to zero as of reference month June 2020; the same applies to Stepstone as of April 2021. XING was not available for several months in the second half of 2021 and the proportion of Arbeitsagentur job advertisements of all job ads was down to just over 2% of the CEDEFOP dataset in November and December 2021. The overall proportion of job advertisements obtained from these five job portals was (in part considerably) below 50% of all job advertisements contained in the V14 dataset as of May 2021. Consequently, this selection of five job portals has no longer been applied.