Solutions for Businesses & Employers

Talent is the lifeblood of your business. Yet when it comes to making smart recruiting, staffing, and strategic workforce decisions, software has never been much help. After all, these are decisions about people – real employees, each with unique experiences, skills, and qualifications – yet so-called “people management” or “human capital management” systems are essentially just inventory systems that deal with SSN’s and tax ID’s instead of SKU’s.

That is, until now.

Burning Glass solutions are built based upon patented artificial intelligence that analyzes people and their careers in relation to the tens of millions of other workers whose transitions it has observed. With this holistic understanding of each individual, our system has learned from real-world patterns what kinds of people have placed into jobs like this in the past, what kind of career transitions a given employee or candidate is likely to make, and what skills they will need along the way – among many others. As a result, we are able to provide active support for your people decisions.

Tactically, that means helping you decide which candidates are best aligned for the jobs you need to fill or creating an open internal staffing market within your company so that you can take best advantage of existing talent. Strategically, that means aggregating our understanding of each employee and providing a panoramic view of your workforce from which to identify and analyze skill gaps and talent supply chains. Similarly, the data we mine from our proprietary database of over 7 million current job listings enables us to provide real-time competitive intelligence as well as the data on which to base investment decisions.

Our solutions support a range of people decisions, including:

Recruiting and Staffing

• Which candidates make sense for the jobs I have open?
• I have a star in my department… how do I find someone just like him?
• How can I reduce cost to hire?
• How do I better leverage the value of our recruitment brand?
• How can I fill key openings more rapidly?
• What jobs and employers have our most successful candidates come from and how do we build a talent pipeline to fit?
• I have thousands of employees ... how can I assemble a team with the right skills for a given project?

Building Employee & Workforce Skills

• Which skills do I need to hire and/or train for because of shortages in my current workforce?
• What skills do we have a surplus of given our current needs?
• In which locations (in or out of state) can I find the skills that I need?
• Which employees could benefit from training at our local community college?
• What are Jane’s skill gaps relative to my current needs?

Competitive Intelligence

• What positions are they hiring for and how does that reflect their current strengths & weaknesses?
• What impact will their hiring have on my candidate pipeline and current workforce?
• What positions are they failing to fill?

The cost of hiring is a big ticket item for most companies, through some combination of:

• Advertising expenses
• Recruitment agency fees
• Time spent in data entry, review, and analysis of resumes received
• Time wasted due to unqualified candidates and unsuccessful placements

Burning Glass can help you significantly reduce your hiring-related costs while simultaneously improving your hiring outcomes and, ultimately, your talent pool. Our solutions:

Find the needle in the haystack – The Internet has made it easier than ever for candidates to find and apply for jobs – which means you are probably flooded with resumes. Burning Glass deploys advanced artificial intelligence to help your staff sort through them quickly and focus their time on the most promising candidates. Just like an experienced recruiter, our technology applies knowledge and judgment learned from past placements to identify the most relevant candidates – all automatically.

Reduce recruitment costs – Employers can spend huge sums on recruitment agency fees and on job board advertising. In many cases, these expenditures wind up yielding applications from whose resumes you have previously received – a tremendous waste of money. We help you leverage the investments you make in recruitment brand by banking the resumes you acquire and providing high tech, intuitive search tools for finding relevant matches, thereby reducing some of the major costs of recruitment. Similarly, our resume parsing solutions reduce the clerical / data-entry costs associated with processing the thousands of applications you receive.

Make better hires – With traditional database search tools notoriously ineffective, recruiters all too often wind up relying on resumes from those candidates who happen to see a new posting. Our solutions analyze every resume you receive in minute detail, evaluating a candidate’s qualifications, skill gaps, and likely career path, and then banking the information in a central database. This allows you to draw on your talent capital as more appropriate opportunities arise, giving you immediate access to the broadest pool of talent, not just candidates who happen to apply for a specific job.

Make more effective staffing decisions – As companies grow, it can be very difficult to know what skill sets are resident within the organization and where. As a result, it is not unheard of for companies to let go employees whose skills are in critical shortage elsewhere in the company. Burning Glass leverages its patented match technology to enable you to search your employee database and identify those with relevant skills and experience for each specific project.

Create an internal marketplace for talent – Too often managers lack visibility into talent availability at the same time that staff lack visibility into new opportunities and projects. Burning Glass solutions can be deployed to help both sides make well-suited matches.

Workforce management has never been more challenging. Sure, there’s a lot of good talent on the market, but the economic crisis, vanishing industries, and rapidly changing technology have conspired to keep HR executives awake at night, contemplating strategies for keeping their organization fully supplied with the skills and knowledge it needs to survive and succeed.

It begins with a comprehensive understanding of the skills possessed by your workforce at the population (not individual) level, but it’s more than that: when compared against your needs, both now and in the future, where are the skill gaps? What is the demand for those same skills in your industry, region, or state, and will you be competing with many other employers to acquire the necessary talent? What training should you offer to help current employees acquire new, necessary skills? What are your current and future skills surpluses?

At the same time, our solutions also help you bring these analyses down to the level of individual employees, enabling you to map their strengths relative to your broader skill and capability needs and to make tactical investments in upskilling in ways that make sense both for the staff member’s career and for organizational priorities.

Burning Glass can help you answer these questions and many others. Our solutions help you know:

Your workforce – Our advanced parsing engine analyzes resumes, employee profiles, and job descriptions and stores more than 100 facts per employee in a searchable database. Using our sophisticated match and gap analysis tools, you can evaluate the aggregated data in order to identify your workforce’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential for upskilling.

Your employees, their strengths, and their gaps – With such in-depth understanding of each employee and the unique skills and experiences they bring, our solutions enable you to make more effective staffing and training decisions and to improve retention by providing new challenges and continuing professional development. Even the most expert, experienced employee should receive regular training to stay current with rapidly evolving technology. Our technology analyzes gaps in education, knowledge, and skills based on job or project requirements and can even make training referrals to local resources, enabling individual achievement as well as business success.

The job market – Effective workforce management doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You need to understand the job market in order to make strategic decisions in context – whether it comes to building your talent pipeline, setting salaries, or deciding the right geographies for planned capital investments. Burning Glass supplements traditional sources of labor market information with real-time actionable intelligence, quantifying market demand for specific qualifications as well as changing requirements for targeted occupations. Our solutions help you base your decisions on an up-to-the minute understanding of conditions and trends affecting a volatile labor market in your region, state, or nationwide.

In order to stay one step ahead of your competition, you not only need to know where they’re at, but also where they’re going. Good competitive intelligence about future direction is hard to get and expensive, especially information that is detailed enough to be actionable and completely up to date. Online job postings have long been used as a source for intel, but with significant limitations: corporate websites are both over- and under-inclusive and can’t be relied on as an accurate gauge of workforce growth and skills in demand. And manual searches of the major job boards are simply too time consuming to conduct, aggregate, and analyze.

But Burning Glass is different. By leveraging our patented parsing and job spidering technology, our Labor/Insight™ real-time market analysis application enables you to know:

Who your competitors are hiring – Burning Glass compiles a database of over seven million current job postings from more than 17,000 websites, including corporate sites, job boards, and newspapers, updated daily. By applying our advanced parsing technology to our jobs database, we are able to identify and report in real-time on the companies who are posting jobs and the specific jobs, skills, and qualifications they are looking for. The result is intelligence that is truly actionable, containing sufficient detail for you to determine which divisions and products are growing and which are not, and to use that information as a basis for strategic planning.

Where they advertise their jobs – Job ads are a significant expense and it’s important that they demonstrate a comparable ROI by effectively attracting quality talent. Knowing where your competitors post their jobs gives you the choice of directly competing for talent by posting on the same sites or seeking out different sites in the hopes of beating them to the punch.

How they advertise their jobs – Again, given the high cost of recruitment generally and job ads specifically, any little edge that you get provides a potential boost to your ROI. If you and the competition are also competing over the best qualified candidates, knowing what they include (and exclude) in their job ads gives you the ability to match and hopefully surpass them when it comes to attracting the talent that will either make or break you.

If they are struggling to find talent – Burning Glass can also analyzing posting activity to track whether employers are struggling to find the talent they need – giving you much needed intelligence about how your competitors are doing and also giving you feedback to guide your own talent pipeline decisions.