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.
Line graph titled “Job postings requiring COVID-19 vaccine skyrocket.”
Line graph titled “Job postings requiring COVID-19 vaccine skyrocket.” With a vertical axis ranging from 0 to 4000, Indeed tracked the share of job postings requiring COVID-19 vaccine per million along a horizontal axis ranging from February 1, requiring vaccinations was up 242% compared to a month earlier.

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. 

Line graph titled “Job posting recommending vaccination dwarf those advertising vaccination not required.”
Line graph titled “Job posting recommending vaccination dwarf those advertising vaccination not required.” With a vertical ranging from 0 to 60, Indeed tracked the share of job postings per million along a horizontal axis ranging from February 1, 2021, to August 30, 2021, with different colored lines representing job postings advertising no vaccination required and job postings encouraging or recommending vaccination with a dotted line indicating when the Pfizer vaccine received full FDA approval. As of August 30, 2021, the share of job postings per million that require being vaccinated against COVID-19 explicitly is up 119% compared to one month prior.

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  

Table titled “Vaccination requirements increasing in multiple sectors.”
Table titled “Vaccination requirements increasing in multiple sectors.” Indeed compared the percentage of job postings requiring vaccination across various sectors as of July 20, 2021, August 30, 2020, and the percent change between the two months. As of August 30, 2021, the share of job postings per million recommending vaccination is increasing, up 40% from July 30, 2021.

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 

Map of the United States titled “Job postings requiring vaccination highest in Arizona.”
Map of the United States titled “Job postings requiring vaccination highest in Arizona.” Indeed mapped the percentage of job postings requiring vaccination through to August 30, 2021, by state with a color scale from blue to red representing states where job postings require vaccination. Job postings that require vaccination are highest in Arizona, with that state colored red.

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

Line graph titled “Rising searches for jobs not requiring vaccination.”
Line graph titled “Rising searches for jobs not requiring vaccination.” With a vertical axis ranging from 0 to 40, Indeed tracked the share of searches for jobs not requiring vaccination per million along a horizontal axis ranging from February 1, 2021, to August 30, 2021, with a dotted line indicating when the Pfizer vaccine received full FDA approval. As of August 30, 2021, the share of searches related to no vaccine requirements increased by nearly 20 times month over month.

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.”