Job vacancies

Job vacancy

The most important aspect regarding the definition of a job vacancy is that the vacancy must be announced, formally or informally, making it possible for external candidates to apply for it. Formal announcements include for example advertisements in newspapers, on the internet, notifying the public employment services or private employment agencies. Informal announcements include for example advertisements in shop windows or public notice boards, or announcements via employees, friends or family. Job vacancies exclusively open for internal applicants (within the enterprise, organisation or corporation) are not included in this definition of job vacancies. The post must be paid.

We do not divide between part-time and full-time job vacancies, and consequently a vacant part-time post is counted as one job vacancy. Moreover, we do not divide between newly created job vacancies ( non-occupied vacant posts) and posts that are announced as vacant to replace an employee who is going on a leave of absence or quitting ( occupied vacant posts).

The aspect of time is also important to identify a job vacancy. Given the definition above, a post is vacant from the point of time where the information that it is in fact vacant is made accessible for external candidates. For this reason, a post is not vacant if there merely has been made a decision internally to hire a new person without announcing it externally in one way or other. Furthermore, the post is vacant until the point of time where the post has been assigned to a candidate (defined precisely as the point of time where a contract of employment has been signed) or until the point of time where one, for one reason or another, has decided not to employ a new person after all.

The figure of job vacancies represents the size of the stock of vacancies at the reference time, at the end of the middle month of the quarter.

See the variable definition in Statistics Norway's Metadata (Job vacancies).

Job vacancy rate

The job vacancy rate is the number of job vacancies in per cent of the total number of posts, which consists of occupied posts and job vacancies. We consider occupied posts to be synonymous with employee relationships.

There is a break in the job vacancy rate between the 4th quarter of 2014 and the 1st quarter of 2015. The break is explained below.

See the variable definition in Statistics Norway's Metadata (Job vacancy rate).

Employee relationships

Untill 2015 we used to collect information of employees from the aa- register in The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NLWA). All employers had to register their employees if they were to work at least seven days and the average working time pr week was at least four hours. From the 1st quarter of 2015 we get these information from the "a-meldinga". The number of employees were larger by this change to a large extend because there are no limits in the working time. Therefore, there is a break in the number of employees between the 4th quarter of 2014 and the 1st quarter of 2015. These figures are not published in these statistics, but are included in the denominator in the joc vacancy rate. Therefore, there is a break in the job vacancy rate between the 4th quarter of 2014 and the 1st quarter of 2015.

See the variable definition in Statistics Norway's Metadata (Job).

Reference period

The reference period in regard to all the variables are set to be the end of the middle month of the quarter. We assume that this reference period is representative for the rest of the quarter. We start our data collection for each quarter at this point of time, and with regard to the variable of job vacancies we refer to this period of time in our question. The variables number of employee relationships and industry are gathered from adapted numbers from "a-ordninga".

Industry is coded according to the Standard Industrial Classification, SIC2007 .