18% of unemployed persons in the EU found a job

The FINANCIAL — Out of all persons in the European Union (EU) who were unemployed in the second quarter 2015, 62.7% (12.9 million persons) remained unemployed in the third quarter 2015, while 17.9% (3.7 million) moved into employment and 19.4% (4.0 million) towards economic inactivity in Q3 2015.

Of all those initially in employment, 96.7% (169.6 million persons) remained in employment, while 1.4% (2.4 million) of those employed in the second quarter were observed to be unemployed in the third quarter, and 2.0% (3.5 million) transitioned into economic inactivity.

Today, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, publishes quarterly labour market flows, based on non-seasonally adjusted labour market data from the European Union Labour Force Survey.

How Structured Interviewing Reduces Bias in Hiring

Payroll employment increases by 272,000 in May; unemployment rate changes little at 4.0%

4 Reasons ‘Quiet Firing’ is Bad for Business

Gartner HR Research Finds Just 32% of Total Rewards Leaders Are Confident in Their Organization’s Assessment of the Effectiveness of Their Well-Being Programs

Labour market flows show the movements of individuals between employment, unemployment, and economic inactivity and enrich the analysis of the net changes in stocks. These statistics help to understand and interpret changes in the levels of labour market indicators. In order to ensure comparability, data published by Eurostat are based on a harmonised methodology. This may result in small differences between these data and those published nationally.

These labour market flows are highly seasonal, which means that both the size and the direction of a flow in and out of unemployment depend not only on general economic conditions, but also on seasonal factors such as students seeking jobs after graduation. As seasonally adjusted flows data are not yet available, only changes compared with the same quarter of the previous year are presented in the following table.

In this table, a negative sign means a lower proportion of persons moving to or remaining in a category compared with the same quarter of the previous year, while a positive sign means a higher proportion of persons moving to or remaining in a category. For instance in the EU, the proportion of persons moving from unemployment to employment from the second to the third quarter of 2015 increased by 0.9 percentage point (pp) compared with the flows between the same two quarters of 2014, while the share of those remaining unemployed decreased by 1.7 pp.