ICAP, the world’s leading interdealer broker, announces that it has launched the UK Labour Market Indices (LMI), monthly leading indicators for the UK labour market. The indices will be released on the third business day of each month, indicating conditions during the previous month.
The indices are designed to help forecast changes in employment levels, claimant figures, wage inflation and sectoral/geographic trends in hiring and trading conditions and sentiment in different sectors of the economy. They are aimed at investors, traders, economists, researchers and recruitment and human resources professionals.
The headline figure is the UK LMI Employment Index, which uses historical correlation between changes in numbers of advertised vacancies and official ONS Employment figures to produce a leading indicator for the labour market that anticipates the upcoming ONS figure.
The core indices also include:
- The UK LMI Unemployment Index: using the number of applications/vacancies to produce a leading indicator that anticipates the ONS Unemployment Claimant Count;
- The UK LMI Vacancies Index, which uses the number of advertised vacancies to produce a leading indicator that anticipates the ONS Vacancies figure;
- The UK LMI Offered Salaries Index – sector-weighted average of offered salaries.
Customers can also license a detailed UK LMI product suite which breaks down vacancy and offered salary data for 48 sectors, such as retail, public sector, manufacturing, engineering and financial services. This can be used to understand hiring patterns within each sector, reflecting confidence and trading conditions, and can be a good indicator of financial performance. Also included in the product offering is regional vacancy data, which highlights the relative growth across different regions of the UK.
Kevin Taylor, Global Head of ICAP Information Services, said: “These indices provide an unparalleled insight into key trends in the UK labour market. They are based on a unique source of employment information, covering more than 60 per cent of all job listings in the UK, providing data earlier and with greater granularity than information currently available to financial market participants. They will be of real value to any financial institution, whether focused on narrow sector or asset class views, or trading and investing across a wide range of sectors and financial instruments.”
The indices are derived from vacancy advertisements and applications routed through and processed by market-leading recruitment software owned by the digital recruitment group Evenbase, part of DMGT plc. This software is used by more than 35,000 recruiters to post vacancies on thousands of job boards and other channels. It is typically managing 150,000+ vacancies at any one time.