Jobs/applications ratio

The Jobs/applications ratio tracks hiring at Hello Work, Japan's public employment offices, compiled monthly by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, or MHLW. The headline effective ratio divides active openings, or carryover plus new postings, by active seekers, or carryover plus new applications. The new ratio uses only new filings, and a regular-staff version tracks full-time posts, as a full count excluding new graduates and including part-timers.

Breakdowns cover industry, firm size, occupation, age and prefecture on acceptance and workplace bases. It excludes private hiring and is not the unemployment rate, which uses a separate survey. Arabic outlets often call it the job-availability ratio.

Each release covers 1 calendar month, with active seekers and openings equal to carryover still valid plus new filings in that month. It is published about 1 month after the reference month on a weekday, with no fixed hour, alongside headline ratios, charts and detailed tables.

December releases add the calendar-year average and March releases add the fiscal-year average, with long series available through e-Stat. Since September 2021 the figures include online registrations and direct applications through the Hello Work internet service. Each January release revises the prior 5 years with new seasonal indexes, and any later correction is announced without replacing archived PDFs.

The ratio moves on six full counts of Hello Work openings and applications, with no preset weights.

• Monthly active applications: carryover seekers plus new filings, the denominator of the headline ratio.
• New applications: cases filed during the month, the denominator of the new ratio.
• Monthly active job openings: carryover unfilled posts plus new postings in headcount, the numerator of the headline ratio.
• New job openings: planned hires posted during the month in headcount, the numerator of the new ratio.
• Persons who found employment: confirmed hires, the numerator of the employment share and national sufficiency share.
• Filled openings: openings matched to seekers, the numerator of the prefecture sufficiency share.

The May 2021 release published June 29, 2021 showed a flat headline effective ratio of 1.09 while the new ratio rose 0.27 points to 2.09. Seasonally adjusted active openings fell 0.3% and active seekers fell 0.4%, so the stock ratio stayed flat. New applications fell 11.7% while new openings rose 1.3% on a seasonally adjusted basis, and 7.7% on a raw yearly basis.

Workplace Fukui led at 1.81 and Okinawa lagged at 0.83, while acceptance Fukui reached 1.77 and Okinawa 0.75, with confirmed hires at 104,066. A flat headline can hide fresh hiring strength, so check the new ratio and both openings and applications moves too.

1. New ratio: new openings divided by new applications. For example, 726,000 postings over 330,000 applications equals 2.20.
2. Effective ratio, or headline: active openings divided by active seekers. For example, 2,280,000 openings over 1,900,000 seekers equals 1.20, or 120 openings per 100 seekers.
3. Employment rate, or share of new seekers hired: confirmed hires divided by new applications times 100. For example, 75,000 hires over 330,000 applications equals 22.7%.
4. Sufficiency rate, or share of new posts filled: nationally hires divided by new openings times 100, while prefectures use matched openings. For example, 75,000 hires over 726,000 openings equals 10.3%.
5. Seasonal adjustment: each input series is adjusted in log form with the Census X-12-ARIMA method using Japanese-calendar regressors and outlier adjustments. The headline ratio then divides adjusted openings by adjusted seekers.
6. Regular-staff ratio: regular full-time openings divided by non-part-time seekers. The denominator includes dispatch and contract seekers, so the result sits below a strict full-time balance.