How well do online job postings match national sources in European countries?
Benchmarking Lightcast data against statistical and labour agency sources across regions,
sectors and occupation
Data on online job postings represents an important source of information for local
labour markets. Many countries lack statistics on labour demand that are sufficiently
up-to-date and disaggregated across regions, sectors and occupations. Web-scraped
data from online job postings can provide further insights on the trends in labour
demand and the skills needed across regions, sectors and occupations. This paper assesses
the comparability and validity between Lightcast and other data sources for Austria,
Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and
Sweden, for the years 2019 to 2022 across regions, sectors and occupations. It concludes
with some recommendations for labour market analysts that want to use data on online
job postings for assessing labour demand trends.
Available from March 11, 2024
In series:OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) Papersview more titles