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Job vacancy statistics in France: a new approach since the end of 2010. Analysis of the response behaviour of surveyed firms after change in questionnaire

Keywords: job vacancies, panel sample of firms, intensive and extensive margin effect

Introduced in mid 2003 in a firm survey, the French question on job vacancy deeply changed at the end of 2010 thanks to the work of an interinstitutional working group. Previously, it used to be a unique question ("do you have job vacancies? If yes, how many?") misunderstood by surveyed firms. At the end of 2010, in accordance with European Reglementations, the questionnaire was more clarified (reformulation and introduction of three sub categories of job vacancies), the method of estimation was refined and the field of estimation was widened (firms of 1-9 employees were taken into account and measure of job vacancies in public administration will be available soon). Furthermore, tests were conducted in order to ask surveyed firms about job vacancies concept (specially the difficulty to clearly separate stocks of job vacancies at a reference point-in-time and flows of recruitments on a longer period). These changes have improved the tracking of job vacancies and have increased their number by 50%; it will be presented and discussed in this paper through monitoring and analysis of the behaviour and the characteristics of surveyed firms before and after the end of 2010.