More and more job openings are requiring you to get the COVID-19 vaccine

A man holds his vaccination reminder card after having received his first shot at a pop-up vaccination site next to Maximo Gomez Park, also known as Domino Park, Monday, May 3, 2021, in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami

Wilfredo Lee/AP

• A new analysis from Indeed Hiring Lab found that more job postings are mandating COVID-19 vaccinations.
• That's likely due in part to more companies mandating vaccines amid the Delta variant surge.
• Vaccine mandates across entire sectors could encourage hesitant workers to get the shot by making it harder to switch jobs
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

As the Delta variant continues to surge across the US, jobseekers may need to add something else to their resume: COVID-19 vaccination.

That's according to a new analysis by economist AnnElizabeth Konkel for Indeed Hiring Lab, who delved into the job site's postings in the week leading up to August 7.

The share of postings per million that explicitly required a COVID-19 vaccine increased by 34% from the month before, and the share of postings that require vaccinations (but not explicitly a COVID-19 jab) went up 90%.

And jobs in industries that historically haven't required vaccinations are increasingly requiring that prospective employees are inoculated.

For instance, in February, only 33.3 jobs per million in education required vaccination, but in July, 2,166 did - a rate 65 times higher. The biggest increase was in software development, with the share of jobs requiring vaccination skyrocketing by over 10,000% from February to July.

Even so, that's still a very small share of total job openings on Indeed, making up just about one in a thousand, according to the report.

The rise of the more-infectious Delta variant has increasingly prompted employers to enact vaccine mandates, with federal and state agencies, alongside private businesses, requiring that their employees get the shot.

March polling by workplace technology firm Envoy found that most American workers wouldn't come back to the office unless there was a vaccine mandate, especially those in more white-collar industries like technology. And CNBC reports that over a dozen large corporations are requiring that at least some, if not all, of their workers be vaccinated.

But, as Insider's Aki Ito reports, the current hot labor market may actually be dissuading companies from requiring their employees to get vaccinated, since it's easier than ever for them to just leave and take a role where vaccines aren't mandated.

Importantly, that's more prevalent for blue-collar workers; one example is Walmart mandating vaccinations for corporate workers, but not those working in stores or warehouses.

Ito's analysis comes amid yet another month of near-record-high quits, with millions of workers (especially blue-collar ones) leaving their jobs - marking a record-high percentage of job separations coming from quits.

As Ito argues, that only shows the need for mandates: Creating industry and sectorwide norms will only encourage more workers to get the vaccine - and reduce the number of jobs they can flee to that don't require it.

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