IAB Job Vacancy Survey - IAB - Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

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Job vacancies and personnel policy in establishments

This establishment survey has been carried out by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) since 1989. It is the only survey in Germany that measures the development of the macroeconomic labour demand in a representative and statistically valid way and examines the recruitment process of establishments in detail. Information on the number of vacancies and positions that can be filled immediately as well as on search and hiring times and ways of recruiting personnel is not only of great relevance to research and labour market policy in general but also to companies/administrations and their associations. For instance, analyses on the basis of this survey have contributed substantially to examining the causes and extent of labour shortages and to providing both establishments and politicians with recommendations on how this could be counteracted. One example is the question of how to counteract a possible shortage of skilled workers. Economic fluctuations can be observed, as can the behaviour of companies during economic crises.

Both the Federal Government and the European Commission support this survey on account of its high relevance to politics and economics. Naturally, the data are of high interest to researchers and are employed by economists and sociologists for a wide spectrum of research questions.

The data provided by the survey participants are subject to strict data protection regulations and are dealt with in strict confidence. This is guaranteed by the Institute for Employment Research as well as the Institut Economics & Data ED23 GmbH and T.I.P. BIEHL & PARTNER, which are currently conducting the survey on behalf of the IAB.

The IAB Research Data Centre (Forschungsdatenzentrum, FDZ) provides data access for external users.

In the course of quality assurance, we had to revise the data of quarters I-III 2020 due to a subsequent exclusion of interviews.