Key points:
- As of August 30, the share of Indeed job postings per million requiring vaccination was up 242% from a month earlier.
- Postings with vaccination requirements rose across sectors and jumped to nearly 2% of Indeed job ads in personal care and home health.
- Arizona had the highest share of postings requiring vaccinations at 1.3%.
- Although still tiny, the share of searches for jobs not requiring vaccination was nearly 20 times higher month over month, with the majority of those searches in healthcare.
A few weeks ago, job postings on Indeed requiring vaccination started to take off and have accelerated since. In the seven days ending August 30, the share of postings per million specifically requiring vaccination against COVID-19 rose 119% from the previous month. Job postings that required vaccination but did not specify COVID-19 followed the same trend, up 242% over the same period.
Both of these postings series represented less than 1% of all jobs ads on Indeed. But with Delta variant cases surging, employers are undoubtedly wondering how they can keep their business’s recovery on track. Vaccine requirements are a way to keep staff and customers safer and business operations running.
Case in point: Some job postings are asking potential hires to verify full vaccination by uploading CDC vaccination cards. A few are even sweetening the deal by offering vaccine bonuses.
Some job ads recommend, but don’t require, vaccination
A small batch of job postings recommend vaccination, but do not require it. On the flip side, a small fraction of postings advertise that vaccination is not mandatory.
In the seven days ending August 30, the share of job postings per million recommending vaccination jumped 40% month over month. In the weeks ahead, it will be important to watch whether job postings encouraging vaccination lose ground to those requiring shots. Employers advertising no vaccination are probably betting their stance will give them a leg up in finding workers. But public health experts stress that gatherings of unvaccinated people can spread coronavirus and drive up hospitalizations and deaths. Advertising vaccination is not required might be a short-term business decision, but some experts would argue it has harmful public health consequences.
Broad range of sectors requiring vaccination
Nearly 2% of personal care and home health job postings included vaccination requirements in the seven days ending August 30. It’s a substantial jump from the previous month, when the share was less than 0.5%. It was a similar story for childcare job postings, which went from less than 1% to nearly 1.5%. The rise isn’t just in fully in-person sectors. Vaccination requirements in administrative assistance and legal job postings increased too even though work in those fields can often be performed remotely.
Geographic variation starting to emerge
Arizona led the nation in job postings requiring vaccination. In the seven days ending August 30, 1.3% of job postings in that state required vaccination, a substantial jump from 0.08% the month before. Washington state was second at 1%, up from 0.16% in the comparable period in July.
Regionally, the West Coast and New England had slightly higher shares of job postings requiring vaccination than other parts of the country. Ten states, illustrated in gray, had too few job postings requiring vaccination for results to be useful.
Searches for no vaccine requirements spiked
In the seven days ending August 30, less than 0.1% of job searches on Indeed involved people looking for work that didn’t require vaccination. Nonetheless, the share of searches for jobs with no vaccine requirements increased nearly 20 times from the previous month. Some of this surge may simply have stemmed from the increased attention to vaccine mandates.
Most of these searches were in healthcare-related fields. In the 30 days ending August 30, 58% of no-vaccine-requirement searches related to nursing — the top search term by volume was “no vaccine required nursing.” With vaccination requirements proliferating in some healthcare-related sectors, such as personal care and home health, job seekers who don’t want to get vaccinated appear to be exploring options.
Conclusion
As the Delta variant wreaks havoc, vaccination rates are increasing. But, with winter ahead, some employers are taking matters into their own hands by mandating vaccination. Job postings requiring vaccination are spread across a variety of sectors and geographic locations. Time will tell how much further this trend goes. At the same time, a small but growing number of job seekers, particularly in nursing, are searching for opportunities that don’t require vaccination. Hiring Lab will keep an eye on these trends in the months ahead.
Methodology
We define requiring vaccination job postings using an extensive list of terms such as “vaccine required,” “requires vaccination,” “must have vaccine,” and “vaccinated against.” In some cases, COVID-19 is not explicitly specified.
We also define requiring COVID vaccination job postings using an extensive list of vaccination terms which explicitly refer to COVID-19 such as “COVID-19 vaccine required,” “requires COVID19 vaccination,” “must have COVID vaccine,” and “must have coronavirus vax.” A job posting is flagged as either “requiring vaccination” or “requiring COVID-19 vaccination” if the text includes a vaccination-related term.
We define vaccination recommended job postings using an extensive list of terms such as “encourage COVID-19 vaccine,” “vaccination recommended,” and “full vaccination is strongly encouraged.” We define vaccination not required job postings using the negative of the vaccination required terms list such as “no vaccine required,” “not require vaccination,” and “vaccination not needed.”
Vaccination not required job searches are defined as those containing “not,” “no,” or “don’t” and “vaccine” or “vaccination.”
