How the index will be built

This document describes a method that is being established, not a method that has already produced readings. Where a decision is still open, it is marked as open rather than described as settled.

What the index measures

The European Senior Care Hiring Index is a weekly indicator of advertised senior-care hiring demand across a defined panel of employers and public hiring sources in selected European markets.

The index measures advertised hiring demand within a defined source panel. It does not measure total employment or independently prove a workforce shortage.

That distinction is the most important thing on this page. Advertised demand is a real signal — employers advertise when they need people — but it is a signal about recruitment activity, not a census of the workforce. An employer who stops advertising has not necessarily stopped needing staff, and an employer who advertises heavily is not necessarily short-staffed.

Sources

Observations come from three kinds of source: selected employer career pages, public employment feeds, and official or government sources. Each source is assessed against the criteria published on the coverage page before it enters a market's panel.

The panel is deliberately fixed rather than maximal. A larger, shifting set of sources would produce a bigger number and a worse measurement, because week-to-week movement would partly reflect changes in collection. Where the panel changes, the change is recorded and the affected series is restated and flagged.

Normalisation

Raw listings are not comparable as collected. Before any calculation, each listing is normalised along three axes:

• Employer. Listings are resolved to a single employer entity, so that one organisation advertising through several channels is not counted several times.
• Location. Listings are resolved to a market and, where reliable, a sub-national area.
• Occupation. Listings are mapped to one of the five occupational families below.

Duplicate detection runs across the normalised set. The same role advertised on an employer's own site and through a public feed is one vacancy, not two.

The occupational taxonomy

The initial taxonomy has five families. It is intentionally coarse: a small number of well-understood categories is more comparable across countries than a long list that fragments differently in each language.

1. Care workers. Direct personal care in residential and community settings.
2. Nurses. Registered and licensed nursing roles working in senior care.
3. Home-care workers. Care delivered in a person's own home, including domiciliary rounds.
4. Care managers. Registered managers, team leaders and clinical leads.
5. Allied and support roles. Therapists, activity coordinators, catering, housekeeping and ancillary roles.

Original and local-language titles will always be preserved. The shared taxonomy allows comparison across countries without erasing local terminology.

Calculating the index

The index expresses the count of active advertised vacancies across the qualifying panel relative to a base period. The first complete qualifying observation is set to 100.0. Subsequent observations are expressed relative to that base.

No index value is published today. The site currently shows establishing the baseline because the source panel has not yet passed its coverage and quality thresholds in any market. Publishing a provisional number now would create a historical series that we would have to disown later.

Publication states

Every figure this publication shows carries one of four states:

• Measured. Produced from a complete qualifying observation.
• Preliminary. Produced from an observation that met the threshold but may be revised as the remaining panel reports.
• Corrected. Restated after publication. Every correction is logged on the corrections page with its date, its cause and its effect.
• Unavailable. Coverage did not meet the threshold. Nothing is published for that market and period. Missing values are shown as missing — never as zero, and never carried forward.

Limitations

SeniorCareWork measures advertised demand within its monitored panel. Figures will be labelled as measured, preliminary, corrected or unavailable. Commercial relationships will never influence source inclusion, index values or editorial interpretation.

Three limitations are worth stating plainly. The index cannot see unadvertised hiring, which in senior care is substantial — a great deal of recruitment happens through word of mouth and rehiring. It cannot distinguish a genuinely new role from a repeatedly re-advertised one that nobody has accepted, until enough history exists to measure persistence. And its country comparisons are shaped by how normal it is to advertise online in each market, which varies.

Independence

Source inclusion is decided against the published criteria and nothing else. Organisations may sponsor research or verify their own information. No commercial relationship influences whether a source is included, what the index says, or how a movement is interpreted. Where a relationship exists with an organisation that appears in the data, it is disclosed.

Versioning

This is methodology v0.1, a research-preview document effective 20 August 2026. Method changes increment this version. When a change affects comparability, the affected series is restated and flagged in the archive rather than silently amended.