ILO Working paper 75

Using Online Vacancy and Job Applicants’ Data to Study Skills Dynamics

This paper finds that big data on vacancies and applications to an online job board can be a promising data source for studying skills dynamics, especially in countries where alternative sources are scarce. To show this, we develop a skills taxonomy, assess the characteristics of such online data, and employ natural language processing and machine-learning techniques. The empirical implementation uses data from the Uruguayan job board BuscoJobs, but can be replicated with similar data from other countries.