The internet has brought buyers and sellers close in an online marketplace. It has also created a virtual job market that has made it easier for employers and job seekers to locate each other. The data that is generated from this job market mainly consists of job posts along with job market data such as in-demand positions, salary information, job hotspots in terms of locations and more. However, analyzing this data gives deeper insights that can benefit individuals, companies and market researchers.
Labour or Job Market Data analysis can include processes like
- Identifying appropriate skill sets and work experience that may be useful for different roles and positions.
- Compensation comparison and analyzing the effect of different factors like location, experience, previous jobs and more.
- Identifying trends such as add-on benefits and perks, remote or hybrid opportunities, the latest tools that may be important for a role, stocks and ESOPs that are being offered by startups in different rounds of funding, etc.
- Building models using historical data and forecasting trends in hiring requirements, across industries, geographical locations and sectors. Such models may also need to be adjusted based on external factors like the Covid Pandemic.
- Finding the hottest job roles that are in high demand as well as the skills and toolsets that are most likely to get one hired.
Job market data can also be used in conjunction with other data sources to find trends that are more deeply hidden and benefit from them. Often hiring activities are not the only use that businesses can put job data to.
An easy example of this is that someone studying the financial market may see that stocks of a certain sector are going down as a whole and the jobs in that sector are also showing a downward trend. This may force the person’s hand to invest in a different sector or make changes in his or her portfolio. Given that enterprises using Job Data can be divided into 2 different segments, we will be discussing the benefits of using job market data for each.
The Employers
When it comes to benefitting from job data, employers are at the top of the list. Right from creating job posts for open positions to figuring out the compensation and benefits that should be attached to different positions and roles across departments– all is done with the help of tons of data today. Data also helps in benchmarking candidates and figuring out who is the best fit for your job among those who clear your interview.
However, if you think job data comes in handy only while hiring you are mistaken. In today’s dynamic environment, companies are often bogged down by high attrition rates. These can be across the company or specific to certain departments or at a certain seniority level. Many factors such as work environment and perks can cause this, but more often than not, lesser pay is the most definitive reason behind resignations.
The scenario is such that employees who have stayed longer don’t usually get their salaries normalized based on inflation and new responsibilities. On the other hand, new joiners cannot be hired below the market rates. This causes a disparity. The result- The median tenure for a private sector employee is just 3.7 years as per this report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This article by a financial portal in India shows that some nations are facing even shorter stints with the average employee staying in a company for just 15-18 months.
This is where Job Compensation Data comes in handy. Employers often use Job Market Data to regularly update and normalize the salaries of critical employees or those who have made significant contributions. Companies facing low job offer acceptance rates or high new hire turnover can also use Job Data to gauge how their job posts compare to positions in similar companies.
Data-driven hiring supported by predictive analytics using historical job data can help companies predict future hiring requirements. Machine learning models and statistical analytics can crunch historical data from your company as well as similar companies to give you an approximate number along with the positions. This will enable you to start the process of finding the right candidates early on so that business requirements do not suffer due to vacancies.
Companies providing job data to their recruitment teams will see the cost going down and their efficiency increase over time. Having the right data can also help in better budgeting, unearthing hiring issues, benchmarking the company’s compensation and benefits, making hiring decisions more objective and less “gut-based”, and improving the overall recruitment process.
The Researchers
Job data can also come in handy for companies that are not hiring or revamping their human resources processes. These types of companies can be divided into 2 types–
- Those using recruitment data to guide either enterprises or individuals in the hiring process.
- And others that are using the data for anything other than hiring– directly or indirectly.
The companies mentioned in the first points process the raw data and provide easy-to-use API-based or dashboard-based solutions to companies and job seekers so that they do not need to interact with the data on their own and can use a mature solution to get the job done.
The second set uses data from the job market to predict which companies may be close to collapse, which sectors may see a boom, what degrees may see their value diminish over the next decade and so on. Fin-tech firms, the education sector, and real estate brokers, there’s no limit to who can use job market data.
For instance, a city seeing rapid growth in jobs can directly see rents increase. This would in turn make people invest in real estate either for long or short-term rentals or for selling off after a few years when the city has reached saturation point. Or a Grocery Chain owner can decide to set up shops in locations which have seen a huge recent growth in jobs. Or a cab aggregator can decide which city to expand to next based on job market data from multiple cities.
Job data can be broken down and you can extract specific data points based on your needs to create the picture that will help your business the most. If the business team can imagine it, and the analytics team has the data the rest is just a little bit of data wrangling and cleaning that is left.
The data itself
You can benefit from whatever you build on top of data only when the data itself is clean, structured, regularly updated, in a format that is consumable easily, and the integration into the current business workflow is easy. This is what you get with JobsPikr. Our AI-enabled Talent Intelligence Platform can help you use Labour Market analysis for any problem statement at hand. While we readily provide solutions for common use cases like choosing the right location for expansion and understanding in-demand roles and skills, our data also help businesses solve custom problems or use the data to create new statistical models and predictive engines. Data is king, and for those in the private industry, job market data is the queen.
