Future of work
A curated resource of recent research on trends shaping Canada's labour market.
(French only)
The main objective of this document is to explore the new possibilities of analysis generated by the emergence of databases built using online job postings. In particular, the document addresses the issue of creating a statistical database from semi-structured data collected on the Internet through web-scraping. As well, it examines the contributions and limits of these databases, their comparability with the usual sources of labour market information and the creation of new indicators based on online job postings.
As an illustration, the document introduces the JOCAS (Job Offer Collection and Analysis System) database, which contains more than five million entries for 2019 from daily collections on several recruitment sites. However, as is common when using online job posting data, the JOCAS database faces issues of representation given that online job postings represent only a biased segment of recruitments. Job offers for executives or in the sectors of information and communication, for example, are overrepresented, whereas job offers in agriculture and hospitality are underrepresented.
Nevertheless, the authors suggest that using data from online job postings is valuable for better understanding labour market tensions — and certain sectors such as the digital sector — and for monitoring labour market indicators.