The ZipRecruiter Job Seeker Confidence Index: Methodology

Data

The ZipRecruiter Job Seeker Confidence Index (JSCI) survey is a nationally representative (when weighted) quarterly survey of U.S. job seekers that measures how optimistic or pessimistic they are about their ability to land their dream jobs. It is administered to a Qualtrics panel of 2,000+ job seekers from the 10th to 16th of the second month of each quarter and weighted to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Respondents may be employed, unemployed, or not currently in the labor force, but they must reside in the United States and plan to find a new job “in the next six months” in order to be included in the sample.

Survey Components

In addition to the screening and demographic questions in the survey, respondents are asked several questions relating to their job search, financial needs, frequency of job search activities, challenges regarding finding a job, attitudes towards their current or prior employment, as well as their expectations, desires, and requirements for future employment. These questions also include a battery of items investigating confidence levels concerning various aspects of the job search process, as well as a question about general outlook on job availability, both of which are used in the creation of the job seeker confidence index.

Weights

The survey data is statistically adjusted using post-stratification weighting to correct for potential nonresponse error and potential coverage error.  These types of sampling error result from collecting data from some, rather than all, members of the population. Weighting is assumed to minimize the impacts of such errors.

Our weighting procedures take the adult population distributions for age, gender, and ethnicity from the most recently available U.S. Census American Community Survey estimates and statistically adjust the data for over- or under-represented groups. Weighting is an iterative process by which the distributions for all the variables of interest are adjusted until they closely reflect their respective targets. When the weights are applied, the categories for age, gender, and ethnicity for this survey are within three percentage points of their actual population values. At the end of the weighting process, the weights are trimmed at the 1st and 99th percentiles to prevent outliers from skewing the results.

The Index

Job seekers’ responses to each question are min-max normalized:

This results in a 0 to 1 scale for each question. The mean of the normalized responses to all 18 questions is calculated as the individual’s index score.

The ZipRecruiter Job Seeker Confidence Index is calculated by taking the weighted mean of the individual index across all job seeker respondents. For subgroup index calculation, the weighted mean is taken only for those job seekers who are part of the subgroup.  

References

U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey. 2019. “2019 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table DP05: ACS DEMOGRAPHIC AND HOUSING ESTIMATES.” Retrieved from https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?g=0100000US&tid=ACSDP1Y2019.DP05