Markets across the world are influenced by changes in demand and supply. The global Job Market is no different. Data analysts and market observers continuously track multiple metrics to get the pulse of the job market and derive valuable insights. These often include finding out which positions are most “in-demand” and which sectors are seeing a downside. Policymakers and government institutions need to make sure that no alarming levels are breached while making the most of the opportunities arising in the job market.
For instance, as the Coronavirus spread this year, governments across the globe implemented different levels of lockdowns. People also stepped out less out of fear of the virus spreading. This led to more and more customers opting to shop online. As a result, job boards and agencies saw a higher number of job posts for delivery and logistic executives. If you look at the stocks of a lot of eCommerce stores and delivery businesses, you can see them soaring around the same time.
The Benefits of Using Job Data for Market Monitoring
Job Data isn’t studied only to understand how different sectors are performing. Its purpose varies based on the final objective
1. Governance of the Job Market
Job Data is used for governance across industries. The growth of newer technologies has seen new certifications that help many professionals stand out among the crowd. These professional courses and certifications also set a standard among adopters of these technologies. At times, analyzing the Job Market can also give insights into the growth of niche sectors. It may also bring to attention the requirement of bringing in new rules and legislations to tackle possible problems that may arise.
For instance, a steep rise in demand for blockchain developers signaled the fact that cryptocurrencies had become hot commodities in their newly found market. This led to crackdowns by different governments around the world, along with new regulations laid down by several central banks. This was done to make sure that the technology wasn’t misused for activities like money laundering by those who wanted to bypass traditional banking methods.
2. Recruitment Analysis of Job Market
Market researchers who want to spot trends in hirings usually go through the recent and historical Job Data feed. Trends like a peak in demand for “Data Scientist” can be spotted if you analyze job posts in tech-niche for a considerable period.
Human resource personnel also use such data to improve their recruitment methodologies, update job descriptions, and set clearer expectations among job seekers.
3. Policy-Making in the Job Market
Government agencies, both central and state often use Job Data to decide on certain policies. For example, governments in multiple countries expect the growth of renewable energy resources to bring in thousands of new jobs. This has led them to incentivize these companies through tax breaks and land acquisitions.
Policies like these help governments make the most of opportunities that arise in the Job Market and enable the creation of more jobs in their geographical locations.
4. Cost Optimization
Job posts can be analyzed by companies who are about to hire new employees. This can be done by studying similar job posts and finding out the average salary offered. Other data points can also be taken into accounts— such as years of work experience and the must-have requirements. The salaries for the posts that are closest to the job-post in question can then be picked up and those can be used as a reference when adding the expected salary package and its upper and lower limits. This data can also be used to negotiate salaries with new hires by human resources. Such data-driven practices enable companies to optimize their expenses.
How can you get this Job Data?
While the internet is the largest and most frequently updated source of job posts, scraping job data, and creating a continuous data feed is no simple task. The reason behind this is the fact that you will need to scrape multiple job boards and job websites to aggregate enough data to ensure both variety and quantity.
To ensure data quality on top of this (so that your research study does not go waste), you will need to make sure that you have proper data cleaning, validation, and verification modules placed on top of the scraping mechanism. You have three choices that you can choose from, and each would fit the bill for different types of requirements.
1. Writing a DIY code
It can be a solution if the Job Data to be scraped is a one-time requirement. Even then, you will need a developer who is experienced in scraping data from the web. You will also need to follow proper protocols and rules to make sure that your act of extraction and use of the data is legal. In case you do not have a developer who is well versed in one of the languages that are used for web scraping today, such as Python or Golang, you can also go for no-code software.
2. No-Code Based Software
This can enable your business team to fetch Job Data from various websites without the need for coding. This would still have a learning curve, but it is bound to take much less time than learning to code and writing a script to scrape job posts from the web. This software is usually paid and in case you want to switch from one software to another, your team will need to go through a re-learning process. Another downside of using a tool that you can subscribe to is that it will always come with some restrictions and pain points and for each issue that may arise, you will have to wait until the next version is released.
3. You can use an end to end Job Discovery and Analytics Solution
that enables you to focus on the research or study instead of worrying about the various aspects of the data at hand. Such a service would usually have all the data processing stages that need to be implemented after the Job Data is scraped, built-in.
Why JobsPikr?
Our team at PromptCloud understands the importance of Job Data in today’s world and hence we came up with an automated job discovery solution, called JobsPikr. With this solution, you will not just have a job feed that is updated in real-time, but also other features like:
- Job Data from top job boards and company websites
- Normalized fields such as job titles and location
- Deduplication of posts scraped from multiple websites
- AI inferred fields such as department, sector, skill-set, company type, and salary
- Advanced filters, which can be used to fine-tune your search results
- API access along with integrations with different cloud storage services like S3 and Google Drive
Having such a solution will cover every aspect of data extraction and integration. This would help you to obtain more accurate results and make inferences that can boost your company to make data-backed decisions.
