Persons seeking work but not immediately available are the sum of persons aged 15-74 neither employed nor unemployed who:
- are actively seeking work during the last 4 weeks but not available to work in the next 2 weeks;
- found a job to start within a period of at most 3 months and are not available to work in the next 2 weeks;
- found a job to start in more than 3 months but are not available to work in the next 2 weeks.
The first of those three groups is the biggest by far.
Note that until 2020 the EU-LFS did not collect the availability to work for people who already found a job to start in more than 3 months. For this reason, all persons having already found a job to start in more than 3 months were classified as seeking work but not immediately available until 2020.
This indicator describes jobless people who do not qualify for recording as unemployed because of their limited availability to start a new job.
The sum of the two groups persons seeking work but not immediately available and persons available to work but not seeking is called the potential additional labour force (PAF). Persons in the PAF are not part of the standard labour force, which is the sum of employed and unemployed people. However, persons in the PAF have a stronger attachment to the labour market than other people outside the standard labour force (i.e. neither employed nor unemployed).