Number Of Job Postings With Vaccination Requirements Climb

Vaccination requirements are becoming more common in online job posting, according to research by job board Indeed.com’s HireLab. However, job postings with vaccination requirements remain a small percentage of overall job listings.

Vaccination requirements are appearing in sectors such as software development and marketing that typically didn’t mandate vaccines.

Key points:

• As of August 7, the share of job postings per million that require vaccinations were up 90% compared to a month earlier.
• Vaccination requirements in job postings are increasing across a wide range of sectors, including software development, marketing, education, and sales — many of which had not previously mandated vaccines.
• The share of software development postings requiring vaccinations increased by more than 10,000% in July from February 2021. 

The US economy is bouncing back from pandemic damage but the Delta variant may derail progress. Employers are well aware that COVID-19, the fear of it and restrictions against it, dampen economic activity and some are not only encouraging vaccination among employees, but are now requiring it. 

In the seven days ending August 7, the share of job postings per million that require being vaccinated against COVID-19 explicitly is up 34% compared to one month prior. Job postings that require vaccination but may not explicitly specify COVID-19 follow the same trend, up 90% over the same time period.

Broad range of sectors requiring vaccination 

Jobs that require vaccination are still a small fraction of postings overall.

But there has been a large increase in job postings requiring vaccinations across a variety of sectors, many of which hadn’t previously mandated vaccinations among employees.

In February 2021, software development had only 3.5 job postings per million that stated vaccination required. But in July, that jumped to 437.9 job postings per million, an increase of over 10,000%. It’s a similar story for other sectors like accounting, retail and marketing that don’t normally require vaccination but are now starting to.

COVID-19 vaccinations only became widely available during late spring and summer, so vaccination requirement trends may rapidly change in coming months.

With vaccination rates still not where they need to be to beat COVID-19, employers are doing what they can to keep their doors open and their staff safe by requiring vaccination. Hiring Lab will be closely watching these trends throughout the fall. 

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 define ‘requiring COVID vaccination’ job postings using an extensive list of vaccination terms and where COVID-19 is explicitly mentioned 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.