COVID-19 hits the job market: An 88 million job ads analysis

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been relevant in all economic sectors. Job loss and decrease in hiring are among the most severe immediate financial impact of Covid-19, while lower economic growth will be the long-term effect. To get a better understanding of what happened, in this work, we have studied the trends of the job market through a massive analysis of job ads taken from LinkUp, a popular Web job-search platform. In particular, we analysed 88 million advertisements to overview the effects of Covid-19 on the entire job market. Results show the Covid-19 crisis to have affected the job market in the 2020 first and especially second quarter, drastically reducing the number of ads in all the sectors (except one). The number of ads has dropped between 4% and 48%, depending on the specific professional figure, with the only exception of the Food Preparation and Serving Related, that has gained 16%.