Competitive & Market Intelligence

It’s stating the obvious to say that online job postings have become the predominant vehicle for job search and recruitment activities, with close to 100% of job seekers using internet resources in their job searches. What’s far less obvious is the rich potential that online postings possess to provide actionable intelligence for companies who wish to stay a step ahead of their competitors and for anyone who wishes to understand current conditions and trends with respect to a specific skill, occupation, industry, or the job market overall.

While any given job posting may, at first blush, appear to provide little or no competitive insight, consider this: online job postings actually serve as a channel for employers across the spectrum of industries and occupations to express their demand for workers. While one posting informs only on the skills and knowledge required for the applicable job, when postings are aggregated for a given industry or employer they deliver significant insight regarding future direction as well as current needs, usually with reference to a specific location and often by citing the respective division, product and/or service involved.

Using a branch of artificial intelligence called Statistical Natural Language Processing (SNLP), Burning Glass has achieved considerable success in tapping the potential of real-time job postings for actionable insight. The key to this has been its development of patented technology for parsing free text data, which it deploys in mining from each job posting a significantly expanded data record, including:

Job function (O*NET) Employer industry (NAICS) Location (geo-coordinates, MSA, LMA) Educational requirement (degree, level, major) Source Common and Specialized Skills (using a multi-level, hierarchical and fully customizable skills dictionary of over 15,000 skills)

Duration and level of experience Plurality (i.e. does this represent just one job?) Normalized salary Intermediation (i.e. was this posted by a recruiter?) Required certifications or licenses Green? (based upon actual skills or work activities referenced in the job ad)

In total, Burning Glass’ parsing technology can extract, derive, and infer more than 70 data elements from any given free-text job listing. When this technology is applied to our database of more than 7 million online job openings, updated daily from over 17,000 job boards, newspapers, and employer sites, the result is the most comprehensive, detailed, and actionable repository of real-time demand data in the industry today.

Burning Glass makes this information available to users in two ways:

• Customized Reports: Burning Glass researchers apply advanced statistical methods to analyze our jobs database and produce reports tailored to client specifications.
• Labor/Insight Interactive Reporting Tool: Burning Glass provides users direct access to its job listings database through a web-based application consisting of a series of easy-to-use reporting tools and filters. Users can track hiring activity by industry, occupation, education, and skills, quantifying market demand for specific qualifications as well as changing occupational requirements. Labor/Insight also enables users to generate a list of employers with the greatest demand for specific occupations, educational credentials, or skills and view actual job postings by relevant category.

 

Examples of customized reports include:

• The number of job openings for one or more employers within the latest year, month, or quarter in any given geography.
• The relative level of demand for a selected occupation or occupational group by a given employer (calculated by dividing the number of postings for that occupation by the total number of job posting for a selected time period).
• The actual salaries indicated (where provided) for job listings, as aggregated by skill, level of education, degree, occupation, job title, certification, etc.
• The sources (websites) which a given employer uses to place job postings, aggregated by skill, occupation, job title, etc.

For more information about Labor/Insight, Burning Glass’s advanced web-based analytic tool, click here.

Recruitment Agencies & Job Boards

• Track your competitors’ job posting activity
• Track your clients’ job posting activity
• Identify new prospects based on the employers with the most job posting activity
• Market your services to new clients by using our matching technology to promote talent (i.e. conduct outreach to prospects using resumes in your database that Burning Glass has identified as the most relevant and qualified)
• Target your marketing efforts based on gap analysis of the labor market

Businesses & Employers

• Track your competitors’ job posting activity
• Decide where to post your jobs depending on where they post their jobs
• Stay in touch with how they recruit new candidates

Workforce Developers

• Track demand for skills, knowledge, and other qualifications both in and outside your region
• Track employer job posting activity for placement and outreach purposes
• By analyzing job bank registrations as well as jobs data, Burning Glass helps you track gaps between supply and demand, including supply/demand alignment

Economic Developers

• Track demand for skills, knowledge, and other qualifications both in and outside your region
• Track employer job posting activity in and outside your region to help retain existing businesses and attract new ones
• For industries that you’d like to grow in your region, use job postings from outside your region to learn more about their associated technologies, occupations, and skill sets

Educators

• Track demand for degrees, program majors, and occupational certifications
• Identify new targets of opportunity in the form of by emerging industries, occupations, and skills
• Track employer hiring activity in your area to assist your students with job and internship placement

Conventional technologies can’t extract more than the most basic data elements from free-text postings, typically only occupational and industry codes or those fields most easily retrieved from data lists or with fixed, hard-coded rules (e.g. job titles, locations, employer names). As a result, the huge potential of online job postings for competitive and market intelligence could not be realized.

Until now. Leveraging a field of artificial intelligence known as Statistical Natural Language Processing (SNLP), our patented technology has parsed millions of resumes and jobs, actually learning from the way each one was written and structured. This sophisticated, dynamic process enables our system to derive and infer as well as extract data, generating 70+ coded data elements for each resume and job listing. In addition, for each reported skill, our system understands how long, how recently, and in what context (e.g. in a job, a course, etc.) it was used. This skills-level intelligence dramatically expands the opportunities for actionable, real-time labor market insight – it’s the difference between attracting an employer to the state by saying “We have 525 people in the Boston area looking for work right now who have the exact machining skill you need” vs. “We have lots of folks who have worked in manufacturing”.