5 Common Use Cases for Our Business Intelligence Product, Job Market Pulse

Since releasing Job Market Pulse, we’ve fielded dozens of questions about how customers can use the platform, and its data, to power their businesses. Job Market Pulse provides analytics on top of our industry-best jobs database, including real-time job postings from over 120,000 companies.  So to help answer them, we’ve identified the most common ways we see customers using the product today.

Here, we dive into those use cases and why having a comprehensive, data-powered business intelligence tool can level up your recruitment strategies, labor market research, and trend forecasting.

Use Case #1: See What Roles Your Competitors Are Hiring

Despite the steady drip of tech layoffs, US unemployment remains quite low (3.7 percent as of May 2023). And with the staying power of flexible work, you’re not just competing with other employers in your area for talent. You’re also competing with every employer that’s A) hiring for similar roles and B) offering remote work.

Let’s say you’re in the battery technology space. The industry is competitive. It seems like everyone is building out their R&D teams so they can develop prototypes more quickly. But you want clarity. You want data that either backs up this hunch or refutes it. So you log into your Job Market Pulse dashboard.

Once there, you toggle between different competitors and view their current job listings. You see that your competitors aren’t hiring engineers at the rates you initially believed. Translation: by promoting your job listings now, you can more easily capture top candidates’ attention. Including salary information in those job listings doesn’t hurt, either.

Use Case #2: View Competitors’ Compensation Packages

Hybrid and remote work has, no doubt, changed the ways job seekers and employers think about compensation. Case in point: 60 percent of employees are willing to take a pay cut for remote work. But if you have a physical location, your area’s hiring market still matters – for a bevy of reasons (like commuting). And you want to make sure that the compensation you offer is competitive for your candidate pool.

With talent searches stretching wider than they did in years past, this is a more complicated undertaking. What is a competitive salary in the flexible work landscape? To answer, you can tap into the wage benchmarking power of Job Market Pulse.

This feature extracts the salaries from our database of more than nine million job listings and lets you break this wage data down by:

• Employer
• Location (city, state, zip code)
• Title
• Job type (full time, part time, contract, etc.)

This means, if you want to see what industry leaders are, say, paying their entry-level data analysts, you can. Plus, we can build custom wage benchmarking reports that filter this wage data in a ready-to-view format.

Only want to see the wage data for competitors in your area? How about competitors nationwide? Interested in getting a report that includes all competitors’ listings with the keyword “bonus”? Customization is in our DNA. We filter our data however you want.

Use Case #3: Check Compliance of Salary Transparency Mandates

As salary transparency mandates grow in popularity, researchers, compliance bodies, and journalists will need data to verify the effectiveness of these mandates.

That’s where Job Market Pulse comes in. We already partner with organizations such as the Colorado Chamber of Commerce. That’s because we understand the importance of salary transparency – both for employers to attract talent and for job seekers to gain equitable pay.

Let’s say you work for a salary transparency compliance body in New York City and you need to see how many large employers (150+ employees) have adopted salary transparency since the mandate went into effect. Because Job Market Pulse offers historical data, you can track salary transparency rates over time and see which companies have updated their job listings to include salaries – and which haven’t.

Use Case #4: Assess Real-Time Hiring Trends in Your Industry

When establishing your recruitment strategy, it’s crucial to consider how other companies in your space are recruiting talent in the face of emerging market trends (like the increased focus on AI and AI-related jobs).

Of course, sometimes these hiring trends are specific to only your industry. Maybe there was a merger between two industry leaders that resulted in a trimmed headcount. That layoff could impact how targeted your recruitment strategies are – if you want to scoop up that talent.

Another example: maybe you work in construction. The workforce is skewing older and older. There aren’t currently enough younger candidates to replace the retired or soon-to-be-retired workers. This kind of trend may compel you to increase compensation packages or offer other incentives, such as apprenticeship or training programs, that attract a broader talent pool.

Still, you don’t know whether these hiring strategies are working – or if the shortage is as pronounced as you think – without seeing the real-time jobs data. You need context to create a well-rounded recruitment and retention plan. That’s what Job Market Pulse offers.

Use Case #5: Forecast Labor Trends

In the past three years, we’ve experienced a global pandemic, the “Great Resignation,” record-low unemployment, and the widespread adoption of hybrid work. Each event has shaped the hiring landscape in some way. And while events like global pandemics are difficult to predict, you can analyze historical labor trends to better understand future market conditions. (Analysts already do this sort of forecasting with recession indicators.)

Maybe you want to gauge job candidate expectations by, say, comparing how quickly in-person roles were filled in 2022 versus how quickly remote jobs were filled in that same time. Maybe you want to project wage growth in your industry. So you aggregate all relevant salary data, calculate wage adjustments by year, and compare those differences to the rate of inflation. Did the salaries grow at a faster rate than inflation? Slower? Were they in line with inflation?

To be clear, these are just some examples of how you could use the historical data in Job Market Pulse to predict hiring trends. The larger idea here is that having a view of the past can give you a window into the future.

Find Your Own Use Case with Custom Industry-Leading Data

This is by no means an exhaustive list of use cases. Our platform is still evolving, and we want to support your work however we can. If that means building custom reports, we’ve got you covered. If that means scraping more job listings to increase the data for a metro market or specific employer, we can do that, too.

If you see a need, we’ll do our best to fill it. As we said earlier, customization is a core part of what we do.

Want to see Job Market Pulse in action? Reach out! We’d love to share more.