4 Ways to Use Labor Market Data to Grow Your Business

For years, we’ve been helping job boards and others in the recruitment tech industry fuel their products with reliable labor market data that we maintain meticulously and monitor constantly. As we’ve grown our data repository, however, we’ve discovered more and more business cases it can support.

Here are four of the most popular use cases for the labor data and labor market analytics Aspen Tech Labs can provide. If any of them sounds like something that could help your bottom line, don’t hesitate to reach out.

1. Turbocharge Your Recruitment & Staffing Efforts

Knowing what the competition is doing is an important part of every aspect of running a business – including recruitment. Labor market data can provide that intelligence via several routes:

• Wage benchmarking: At the simplest level, employers should know what kind of wages their competitors are paying. Our wage benchmarking tool lets employers research wages by job title, location, employer, and more.
• Competitive research: You can also look at labor and hiring data from your direct business competitors. Are they beefing up their delivery team ahead of the holiday season? Are they offering signing bonuses for seasonal summer workers? Are they disclosing salary data in job listings to attract more candidates (Figure 1)? Our database lets you sort data by specific employers you’re curious about.
• Talent competition: In some roles, employers aren’t only competing with their business competitors for talent. They may also be competing with organizations they wouldn’t otherwise consider competitors – like when, during the Great Resignation, some frontline healthcare workers found they could make better wages with lower stress in retail jobs. Labor market data can give you insight on your talent competition so you have a 360-degree view of who you’re up against to hire the best of the best.

Figure 1: In the last 12 months, salary disclosure in job listings has increased by 44.8%

Have a recruitment or staffing question we haven’t addressed? Let us know – there’s a good chance some of our labor data could help you.

2. Fuel Your Labor Market Research, Especially for Investment Decisions

Whether you conduct scholarly research, research to drive public policy, or research to guide specific investment decisions, our real-time and historical labor market data might be of use.

We collect job listings directly from employer websites and ATSes, then meticulously clean that data to ensure it’s accurate, timely, and comprehensive (Figure 2). Our historical database includes labor market data dating from September 2022, and we’re constantly expanding our database of current data to include more employers in more geographical regions.

While there are other sources of labor market data available to researchers, our data has three major advantages, which are of particular value to investment bankers and others interested in using this data as a leading indicator of a company’s performance:

1. Unlike data from BLS and other government sources, our data is updated daily (and can be updated more frequently). BLS data is an excellent way to assess macroeconomic trends after the fact, but for anyone who needs to know what’s currently happening in the labor market, it’s insufficient.
2. Our data is not survey-based. JOLTS (the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey by BLS) surveys about 21,000 companies, gets a response from about 7,000, and extrapolates those findings to the economy as a whole. Again, that’s useful for macroeconomic assessments, but it doesn’t provide much insight into specific companies or regions. Our data comes from collecting and scraping actual job listings. We don’t extrapolate; rather, the data we have represents the job market as it is.
3. We provide job scraping services to job boards, so their advertising platforms can stay synchronized with their customers – the hiring firm. In fact, job scraping is a major line of business for us. This is not true of many of our competitors. What does this mean for researchers? It means we have tools and technology to catch changes and fix errors faster. Our customers require precise data, delivered daily.  This can be hugely important in cases like what we saw at Amazon in 2022, when it removed tens of thousands of job openings shortly before announcing less-than-expected returns and seeing its stock price plummet.

Figure 2: Job vacancy data for two public companies, July 2023 – June 2024

Curious about whether our labor market data might meet your research needs? Get in touch. We’re always happy to discuss potential applications.

3. Improve Your Career Counseling Offerings

College and university career centers are an invaluable resource for students as they seek internships and make post-graduation career decisions. But most career centers don’t have the kind of granular insight that historical and real-time labor market data can provide.

Imagine how much more specific counselors could be when armed with such data. A student waffling not between majors but between cities to live in after graduation could work with a counselor to look at median salaries around the country, compare that data with cost-of-living data, and walk away with a much more concrete idea of what their lifestyle might be in various destinations.

Detailed labor market data might also help universities engage alumni.

Imagine building a resource that alumni could use when they’re looking to hire employees – salary data, information on talent competition, industry trends, and more (Figure 3). Or else you might build a digital tool for alumni considering a career change: real-time information about job openings in various industries, plus starting salaries – supplemented, of course, by information about your university’s courses in that field.

Figure 3: Real-time labor market data to power alumni’s hiring decisions

4. Drive Economic Growth in Your Region

Public sector organizations – from chambers of commerce to city counsels and beyond – can tap labor market data to fuel economic growth and prosperity. That’s exactly what Colorado’s Chamber of Commerce is doing, in fact.

The Chamber uses ATL data to create a quarterly report on the state of business in Colorado. Having this information enabled the Chamber to create long-term goals for growth – and lets them track their progress. In addition, the concrete, direct-from-employer, real time data gives them a valuable tool for advocating for business-friendly legislation to the state legislature.

Because of the granularity of data available through ATL, public sector organizations at any level can emulate this model, using accurate labor market data to assess the effectiveness of current policy and advocate for changes that improve the status quo.

Could Labor Market Data Be the Edge You Need?

We’ve laid out four applications for labor market data here, but there are no doubt others we haven’t considered. If you suspect that labor market data or analytics could help drive your business forward, we’d love to have a conversation. We’re constantly expanding our offerings to meet client needs, and we offer a free one-month trial to anyone interested in seeing our data in action.

For more insight into the type of data we have available, check out our Q2 2024 US Jobs Report.

Reach out to schedule an initial conversation!