Abstract

To receive support in filling vacancies, establishments in Germany can issue a placement order for job offers to the Federal Employment Agency. In the course of the placement process, agency staff documents the characteristics and progress of these job offers in the so-called “VerBIS” system. We develop a heuristic to transform this complex pro-cess data into a spell dataset at the level of single vacancies, which includes information on the start and end of the search, length of the search, type of completion, establishment, target occupation, and required working time, among other variables. The resulting micro dataset allows to re-produce the official statistics of registered vacancies – including their number, structure and duration – on a monthly basis.