Indeed Hiring Lab is re-releasing our Job Postings Tracker as the Indeed Job Postings Index, a daily measure of labor market activity that is updated and will continue to be released weekly. Covering seven national markets in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia, the Indeed Job Postings Index meets one of Hiring Lab’s primary goals: produce high quality and high frequency labor market metrics using Indeed’s proprietary data.
The primary difference between the Indeed Job Postings Index and the legacy Job Postings Tracker is the level. The Indeed Job Postings Index is set to 100 on February 1, 2020, and this effectively provides a uniform level shift of 100 to the existing Job Postings Tracker across all time points.The Job Postings Tracker measured the percent change in postings from February 1st, 2020. For example, if the Job Postings Tracker were 40%, the corresponding Indeed Job Postings Index on the same date would be 140. Additionally, we are now including year-over-year and month-over-month percent changes in the Indeed Job Postings Index as part of our data portal on hiringlab.org/data and on our GitHub page. Month-over-month changes are calculated as 28 day (4 week) differences to control for day of week.
As Covid-19 fades from the global labor market discussion, moving to an index better reflects current economic conditions. The Indeed Job Postings Index allows us to compare job postings more naturally across flexible date ranges as opposed to comparing to the pre-pandemic baseline. It also places Indeed’s job postings metric in a broader class of macroeconomic indexes such as the Case Shiller Index that measures house price appreciation and the Consumer Price Index that measures inflation.
