The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is looking for organisations that hold information about online job adverts that would let it produce a data series on labour demands in local authority areas.
The ONS will need data including job titles and descriptions, industry and occupation classifications, geographic information, skills required, dates and lengths of posting and salaries. It hopes to hear from providers that cover the whole of the UK’s online job advert market, which could provide bulk data extracts, metadata or aggregated data.
The procurement notice has a deal value of zero and the ONS says the partnership would offer the opportunity “to create better and more timely statistics to be used by all for the benefit of the public good”. However, it adds that the work could be funded if a provider met all the ONS’s requirements.
The ONS has been publishing an experimental job advert index using data from Adzuna, an online job search engine that collates information from thousands of sources, as part of its work to produce fast research in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the source data varies in geographical accuracy, meaning that the current index provides data across the three devolved UK nations and nine English regions rather than for smaller local authority areas.
As it uses multiple third parties, Adzuna’s data also includes duplication and positions that have been filled but not removed from online vacancy boards.
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