Using Job feeds to Perceive Demand in the Job Market

Jacob Koshy June 21, 2017

If there’s one thing constant about the job market today, it would be is its highly dynamic nature. As the technologies being used by businesses keep evolving on a continuous basis, the skill-sets required to handle them are sure to change too. This is evident from the mushrooming of new jobs; many of today’s high-paying jobs did not even exist a few years back. Such is the pace at which the job market evolves.

Keeping up with the fast pace of developments in the labour market is vital for developing new policies in the employment sector and for organizations to make smart hiring decisions. Now, this shouldn’t ideally be a challenge considering that we have advanced big data technologies to predict anything and everything that leaves data footprints.

However, this is not exactly the case. All the labour market data that we have for analysis is retrospective and no longer applicable in today’s highly evolved business world. As we mentioned above, the rapid developments fueled by the proliferation of big data are changing the world we live in at the blink of an eye. In order to derive relevant insights, there should be a steady supply of time-relevant data – which is unfortunately hard to find from the public domain.

Why Data from Government Agencies won’t cut it

The labour data from government agencies is inadequate for carrying out any sort of prospective analysis in the hiring space. For one thing, government agencies conduct this data collection as a periodic activity by looking at payrolls of those already hired, which makes the data stale and outdated. To make things worse, most part of the data is acquired via outdated means of data collection, which means it could be skewed or erroneous. As the market is heavily dynamic, it’s crucial to have fresh job listings data for demand-perception and other analytics activities.

Job Data Feeds to the Rescue

One of the few data sources that reflect every change in the job market is the job posting database by companies. Since companies post jobs only when there’s a need for talent, there is simply no questioning the authenticity of this data. Job listings data, being a true indicator of demand in the job market, make for the best available data source for the job industry for predictive analysis.

With JobsPikr, it’s now possible for labour analytics firms, HR consultancies, and companies to get access to ready-to-use job data feeds. This data, being extracted directly from the career pages of companies that belong to various industries and geographies, means you can easily get the bigger picture of the job market by plugging it into a powerful data analytics suite. Here are some ways companies can leverage this ready-availability of job data:

Identify the Demand Share of Different Industries/ Companies

Companies in the labour market analytics space need huge amounts of fresh job data to bring out insights that they will be sharing with interested parties. Job postings data from a particular region can quickly provide them with the ability to identify the industries and companies that are hiring more frequently, which is a crucial data point for HR consultancy firms to get their targeting right.

With these insights, HR consultancies can tweak their ongoing lead generation activities and also prepare themselves for the perceived demand for a particular time period ahead. When done right, this can effectively improve their conversion rates and take their growth graph higher.

Discover the Job Titles in Demand

It’s not always easy to assume the demand of a particular job title unless there’s solid data to back it up. Identifying the job titles in demand opens up numerous business opportunities to companies in the HR analytics and education spaces. While recruitment agencies can use it for lead generation and talent pool optimization, educational institutions can take cues from it and tweak their courses for the on-demand jobs.

This data can also help candidates get a bigger picture of the job market and the skills in demand. They can then use it to work on matching their skills with the demand, which will ultimately improve their chances of landing the dream job.

Analyze Competition

Industries are hitting their peak saturation points as the competition keeps tightening by each passing day. Along with this, the need for quality talent is also on the rise. Not only are talented candidates in high demand, but there’s also a stiff competition between companies for acquiring the brightest minds out there. It’s quite natural then for candidates to choose the best opportunity offered to them. By analyzing the job data feeds in their region, companies can identify their contenders in terms of talent and optimize their offer, including the compensation structure to beat them hands down.

Sometimes, the job postings made by a company could also reveal what they are up to. For example, if you notice a spike in the requirement for PhD. candidates at your competitor’s company, it could indicate that they are onto some serious research and development work. This information could be used to anticipate their next move and prepare yourself for the same.

Bottom line

Job data feeds from JobsPikr can be resourceful in analyzing labour market trends at international, sectoral, and occupational levels, as well as conducting analyses for employers. This would change the labour analytics model to being more predictive than retrospective. By using this data creatively, companies in the recruitment sector can optimize their lead generation activities while employers can use it to hire better talent. There’s just no denying that the easy availability of Job data holds immense potential for the recruitment industry in today’s fast-paced market. You can have a look at the insights that we derived from 250K US-based Job listings to get an idea about the analyses possible on job data.