Opening The Big Data Future of Employment Branding

From HRExaminer

Review: Wanted Analytics

What if you had a database of the 700 Million job postings that have been circulated since the mid 2000s? What if that was supplemented with Department of Labor data on the supply of people around the US? What if you were smart enough to correlate the two? What if you could extract compensation and benefits data from the subset of ads that carry it? What if you were an early leader in the solution of big data problems?

Well, for starters, you’d be Wanted Analytics.

Quietly, over the last couple of years, the East Coast company has established itself as a data powerhouse. While I’m most interested in the employment branding implications, Wanted Analytics uses its data for economic forecasting (they’re getting better and better), employment data for national and state governments, hiring friction analysis, compensation data and a range of sourcing strategies and tactics.

If you know who’s hiring, as evidenced by job ads, you can know a host of other things.

For instance, most companies believe that their labor market competition is the same as their commercial or consumer competition. Nothing could be further from the truth. Competition varies by job. The fact that this is so little understood explains much of the conundrum around employment branding.

Think back to yesterday’s 9 Employment Branding Buckets. There are three functional types of employees:

• Core: These people are the organization’s DNA. Their specialties drive products and innovation. One competes fro them wherever they are


• Business: These people make the organization operate (HR, Finance, Facilities, non-essential Engineering and Manufacturing). You hire them locally and compete in the local market for them.


• Digital: These people allow the organization to have a 21st Century look and feel. You are competing with Google, Amazon, Microsoft and anybody who is trying to prosper in the social technology age.

On a job by job basis, the Wanted Analytics data can be displayed to show where a particular job is being hired and who the day to day competitors are. With data in hand, in becomes particularly clear that the competition varies by job and location. If you act like your competition is Bank of America and it’s really Microsoft, you are going to have trouble recruiting. The Wanted Analytics tool allows you to see this and monitor it.

Wanted Analytics also collects and maintains a collection of labor supply statistics by job category. This makes it possible to see the difference between available supply and marketplace demand. In a sample analysis, we looked at Marketing Managers in the publishing and entertainment industries. In some cases, the demand was 50% greater than the supply if all of the people in the supply were available for work.

When you run into tight supply problems, Wanted has another tool.

By looking at and evaluating the history of hiring for a specific position in a specific locale, it’s possible to zero in on places where there are liable to be people who are the exact right fit. A job ad, two years later, is a perfect piece of intelligence.

By looking at the competition over time, comparing old job ads to your current requirements, searching for the person who got hired (on LinkedIn) and contacting them, a good bit of the uncertainty about fit can be eliminated up front.

The future of recruiting is vastly more data driven than it is today. The Wanted Analytics toolkit will be a critical piece of that future.