In the last decade, the Internet has been the differentiator for businesses. If your business wasn’t online, you were missing out on a ton of customers and it would likely affect your sales when compared to your competitors who had an ‘online presence’. Today we have arrived at the decade of data. The company that has reliable and trustworthy data in its hands will come up at the top.
When it comes to data, one of the most overlooked data is job data. While at the surface job data may seem to only give you a view of how the job market is doing, in reality, it goes a lot deeper. Today, even those betting on stocks use Job Market Data to figure out which company will grow quickly and which is on its last leg.
Decoding Growth Trajectories
Is your competitor hiring a bunch of data engineers? Are they expanding their marketing team? Have they suddenly started hiring for a new location? All of these questions can be answered by Job Market Data. It can also help you gain more insights into how your competitor is coming up with new business strategies. A competitor might be hiring data engineers because it wants to build a robust data infrastructure to support AI or ML-based research to boost its business goals. Expanding the marketing team can be due to a company wanting to increase its digital marketing efforts. Hiring at a new location can be a direct result of opening offices in new locations.
However, the answers that we guessed here may only scratch the surface. Delving deeper into the actual job posts may shine the light on more information. For instance, companies may be opening satellite offices in smaller towns with good infrastructure to hire more resources at lower cost. This would be unearthed only when you go through more job posts for that particular town and see the trajectory of growth in jobs. You will also need to analyze the type of companies that started hiring in the area.
Expanding the marketing team may be due to multiple reasons. You will need to look at other companies in the same sector to see if the company stands out or whether other companies are also growing their marketing teams. If the company stands out, you can check historical job posts to get an approximate number of marketing executives that they already have. You may also want to look at their online and offline marketing presence. All the data will need to come together to explain the underlying cause.
Most companies would only hire several data engineers only if they are creating a new data team, or if they are rapidly increasing their data efforts. You may want to extract the skill sets and the tools mentioned in the job posts of these data engineers to figure out what type of work is being carried on and the problem statements they are trying to solve. Such information may help you figure out how adept your own data team is or create job posts when you yourself hire for new data engineers.
Decoding Strategic Moves
Companies may want to hide strategic moves from their competitors. However, those may come to light when scouring through their job posts. For instance a job post for a CXO position may only mean two things– an existing CXO was fired or the company wants to invest in a completely new vertical. Either of the information may be valuable to you.
Multiple new hires in a country in which a company has no presence may be interpreted as international expansion. Hiring of more junior level employees may mean that your competitor is seeing more business and needs to help support more customers.
While an increase in job positions can answer loads of questions in the job market, a decreasing count of job positions can also shed light into a ton of information. If your competitor is hiring less or has stopped new hires altogether and is also resizing its team, it may mean that things aren’t going too well for them.
Every data that you receive needs to be interpreted correctly. Incorrect interpretation may lead you to conclusions that may harm your own business. Some job market data may show trends for a particular company whereas others may explain the situation for an entire sector or region.
Hiring Right
One of the biggest advantages that you would have when studying competitor job posts is that you would know the exact requirements that they prefer for specific roles. These could include critical data like years of experience, software and hardware skills, and more. You would also know what salaries and benefits are being offered for the specific requirement set.
Once you have all this information under your belt, you could come up with optimized job posts with competitive salary and benefits which may help you get your hands on the best talent. At times you may even be able to poach talent off your competitors if you can figure out what they are missing and whether you would be able to supplement that.
The Job Market Data
Before you delve into the world of Job Market Data for achieving a competitive edge, you need to figure out a few things–
- Which sector do you want to target?
- Who are your immediate competitors?
- Which are some of the smaller companies in the same niche that are growing quickly?
- What are the data points you want to study– the roles, the skill-sets, salaries, location, and more?
Once you have answers to these questions, you would need to start scraping job posts from different sources– Job Boards, Career pages of companies, Job Portals, Social Media websites like LinkedIn and more.
Scraping Job Market Data may be difficult for companies that do not have a technical team already. Setting up a new team of folks experienced at scraping data would neither be efficient nor cheap.
DaaS Solutions
IaaS solutions like AWS S3 or Google BigData, allow you to subscribe and start using them in a matter of minutes or hours. Similarly, JobsPikr brings Job Market Data from around the globe to your fingertips through a very short process. You need to fill up a form where you mostly choose filters such as sector or region of job data along with how you want to consume it (API, Cloud Storage, etc), and some other details and you would have data coming into your system in less than a day.
Given that both startups and Fortune500 companies may want to use Job Market Data to get a step ahead, you pay based on usage. So if you consume data only for a single country and a single sector– that’s all you pay for.
While some companies may have a mature business or analytics team to consume the raw data and come up with its own findings, others may prefer to have the data in an easy-to-use dashboard. JobsPikr provides both options for those who want to figure out what their competitors are upto.
