Relevance

The main scope of the Job Vacancies Survey as laid down in the regulation (EC) No. 453/2008 requires the regular quarterly production of statistics on community job vacancies. Enterprises are asked to provide the number of vacancies available as at the reference date along with the number of occupied posts.

Methodological description of survey

The Job Vacancy Survey is a quarterly survey with a sample size of approximately 2,000 enterprises. The target population for this enquiry comprises enterprises employing 1 or more persons and operating in all economic activities with the exception of agriculture and fishing, activities of households as employers, undifferentiated goods and services-producing activities of households for own use and activities of extra territorial organisations and bodies (NACE A, T, U).  The sampling strategy for this survey is stratified random.  

Data for the surveyed companies is collected either via email or by post (only for entities for which no email address is available).  Following the elapse of the deadline, a reminder (via email) is sent to non-responding units and additional chasing is carried out by telephone. 

Another part of the survey relates to information collected from the public sector.  To this end all data pertaining to employment and vacancies generated within government ministries, departments and organisations is collected via administrative sources.

Accuracy and reliability of data

Information on the accuracy and reliability of data can be viewed in a dedicated metadata report available on the NSO’s metadata website.

Timeliness and punctuality of data

Data collection starts during the first week following the end of quarter. First results are finalised 70 days after the end of quarter and submitted to Eurostat within the stipulated timeframes.

Accessibility and clarity of data

At a national level, no statistics related to JVS are released but data can be downloaded from Eurostat’s online database.

A quality report is compiled and sent annually to Eurostat whereas a metadata report is available on the NSO’s metadata website.

Coherence and comparability/consistency of data

Definitions are harmonised across all European Union (EU) Member States, thus data is fully comparable at EU level. Differences in coverage exist since a number of Member States do not cover enterprises employing one or more persons or do not cover all the economic activities as stipulated in the regulation.  Since 2017 the national JVS started to be fully compliant with the target population that is to be covered in the job vacancy survey and prior to this year, national data on job vacancies only related to enterprises employing 10 or more persons.

Overall, employment data is in line with that compiled from the Business Register. On the other hand, coherence across domains for data on job vacancies is not possible since information on vacated posts is not available from other sources.

Metadata