5 Unusual Ways Businesses Use Data from Public Job Postings

Millions of new job opportunities appear online every day. For candidates, it’s usually the main way to find new career opportunities. For companies, job posting platforms offer a convenient way to find qualified professionals.

However, some businesses find a different value in public job postings, treating them as a valuable source of data on potential clients, specific competitors, the job market, and more.

Together, let’s look at 5 popular and lesser-known use cases of public job postings I encountered in my experience working for a public web data company.

About job posting data?

Job posting data is extracted from job ads posted by companies looking for employees on various online platforms, career sites, and social media pages. A job posting typically consists of quite many data points that are intended to describe the job to the candidates. But this information is very valuable for analysis as well.

Job postings reflect the general conditions and trends of the job market. While a separate job ad is all a candidate needs to identify and forecast trends, companies need large-scale job posting datasets.

However, job ads also hide more subtle layers of information about companies that are looking for new employees. Like their tech stacks or challenges they aim to tackle with the new hire.

They also provide information about the direction a particular job position is leaning toward due to technological advancements and other factors. For this purpose, companies create subsets of data based on specific parameters that help them filter job postings of companies they are interested in or use such tools as APIs to extract relevant job data on demand.

It’s not surprising that there’s a high demand for high-quality web data extracted from job postings as it can inform major decisions in business.

Job data use cases

Data for job matching and requalification

A common use case of large-scale job posting data is building and improving tools designed to match companies and candidates. Having access to high-quality datasets that are continuously updated allows for creating various platforms that make it easier to hire the right talent and to find a job quickly.

Conversely, job data also enables teams to build niche HR technology tools. For example, online tools that help candidates shape their careers by providing insights for reskilling.

Data on hundreds of millions of jobs posted online provides a substantial basis for more in-depth, unique insights about the required qualifications for specific job positions and how they change over time. It also makes it possible to dive into particular industries, say, healthcare, which makes these tools even more valuable for companies and candidates looking to be matched with the right one as quickly as possible.

Job posts as an early growth indicator

Companies working with B2B data, especially in the investment and sales technology industries, use job posting data to spot signals of company changes they are interested in. Investment companies, in particular, monitor job postings to spot hiring sprees, analyze how and which company departments are growing, notice changes in leadership positions, and more.

All of the above signals about changes that investment firms want to be aware of when evaluating investment opportunities.

Hard-to-close job positions

Keeping track of hard-to-close job positions allows businesses to build tools that help companies close them faster, for example, by offering a solution focused on discovering hard-to-find talent. It also provides these B2B businesses with very valuable insights that help them shape their direction and even communication. Reliable data on the trends of the job market empowers companies to become experts in their industry.

Insights about popular job positions

Popular job positions can be those with a higher number of applicants and those that are most common in the industry and area a company is analyzing.

Similarly to hard-to-close job positions, keeping track of popular ones signals about the demand for specific talent. It also provides insights about the job market itself. This intelligence is what many companies seek. Therefore, in the web data industry, there’s always a demand for job posting data that’s up-to-date. Now, businesses want to have almost real-time access to what job postings are available on the web.

Extraction of technographic data

Earlier, I mentioned that just like investment firms, sales technology companies often use job postings to stay up-to-date with what’s happening behind the walls of the businesses they want to sell their products. Job posting data helps them answer questions like:

• What tech stack is this company using?
• Are they open to tech stack changes?
• Is this a good time to approach this business with our offer?

Here’s why. Most job postings have very detailed job descriptions that provide a lot of information about the tools companies are using, the areas they are expanding to, their current focus, and so much more. For example, when hiring tech talent, businesses usually list the tools a candidate should be familiar with.

Final thoughts

In this article, I have shared only a brief part of the many ways I witnessed businesses use public web data in recent years. It is exciting to see how data helps entrepreneurs and their teams build necessary solutions to improve how we hire and get hired.

And lastly, keep in mind that to make it all happen, a stable supply of fresh job data is needed. The results you’re getting are as good as the data you use to get them.

This article was originally published in Datafloq.