The notion of hiring the “right” candidate needs clarification of what’s “right” for your organization. Starting from the alignment of values, motivation, ambition, and technical skills required for the position.
Along with soft skills including emotional intelligence which goes without saying, are critical components in constructing a team that is productive and result-driven.
There’s a famous quote, that goes,
‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’
Peter Druker, Management Consultant
This does not directly mean that strategies made by corporations are unimportant in driving success– but rather the quality of your team– beyond cutting-edge tech and flashy accolades, is the firm’s spine that needs the credit for real success.
Job seekers prioritize enriching company culture, and fostering support in their professional journey when making career decisions.
Therefore, Job Postings play a significant role as an opening gambit to your treasure trove, i.e. recruiting top talent.
Job Postings Data
The advancement in data science and technology has given a new perspective to glean insights off of job posting data. A report from Forbes states that 74% of enterprises rely on big data analytics for competitive intelligence.
For competitive intelligence, Job data is the cornerstone that enables data-driven decision-making. The hiring trajectory of an organization is a crucial element that acts as a source of market insights. By analyzing unbiased and reliable job data, the competitors of the relevant industry can objectively understand the industry trends.
The frequency of job posts is also the company’s indication of expansion or downsizing. Similarly, Job descriptions for in-demand positions, such as Data Scientists, highlight the most sought-after skills.
Thus, results derived from job data analysis offer benefits to various stakeholders like employers, their competitors as well as job seekers.
Now, we ourselves have conducted research by extracting job posting data of big tech, retail, and food chain enterprises.
Disclaimer: All analyses presented here are based on a sample dataset from one of our data extraction projects. Hence, they do not reflect the entire market. This is only a hypothetical use-case of potential insights that could be gathered for better decision-making.
Here are the bite-sized actionable insights you can take if you are short on time to read the whole thing.
Based on our hypothesis of job posting data analysis:
Jobs Data Actionable Insights
- Building the Metaverse Momentum: Meta had the highest number of hires in Data Scientists following Google’s mass layoff. It advances rapidly with a fresh and new tech team to engineer the metaverse into reality.
- Texas Roadhouse Domination: In the food chain industry, Texas Roadhouse (The American Steakhouse chain) has the highest number of hires. It has drawn in foot traffic at its current locations at a rate that outstrips many of its competitors and needs to extend the team.
- Data Science Preeminence: Jobs in the field of Data Science have a high demand in the retail industry. Walmart is in the lead by 54.9%. The retail industry is turning towards data for comprehensive insights into current sales operations and following the lane of data-driven decision-making.
- Walmart’s Trump Card Big Data: Walmart hires the most number of data scientists to utilize Big Data. It has increased its sales turnover by enhancing customer emotional intelligence quotients.
- Dollar General’s Growth Spurt: Dollar General rapidly posted more than 10,000 sales and managerial positions in different store locations. It is diligently adhering to its goal of expanding the number of stores in the US and Mexico.
After Mass Layoff – Google Follows Meta’s Hiring Pattern
Google cut hundreds of jobs in its global recruiting organization in January 2023. 12,000 job cuts affected roughly 6% of the full-time workforce.
Keeping this news about the job market in the back of our minds, we extracted data from the job postings of primary tech industry players.
After running an analysis, we have come to notice that Google shows a similar hiring pattern with Meta by a lag of a month till September 2023.
Surge in the Quest for Data Scientists
The data science industry is rapidly evolving. The trend of integrating Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine learning in software applications for advanced functionality continues.
Data scientists find patterns, and algorithms, by advanced analytics and interpretation of ambiguous and complex data sets.
They create predictive models that help in forecasting outcomes and work in building generative AI models. Thus, by default, they are more likely to be sought after by businesses to stay updated & mark their presence in the data-driven world.
Data Science for Metaverse
The data visualization from the analysis of job posting data is instrumental in showcasing the inflated demand for data scientists in the 562.2 billion dollars worth company, Meta.
During June, more than 28% of jobs that were posted were related to data science.
With this in mind, we deciphered that Meta is investing rigorously in the research and development to launch Metaverse.
The popularity of generative AI, like ChatGPT, DALL-E by OpenAI, and Bard (now Gemini) by Google, which creates art, images, and provides coding assistance, seems to have inspired Meta.
As a result, Meta is steadily advancing towards the launch of their virtual reality platform, known as the Metaverse.
It is followed by Apple’s job postings that reveal a focus on ‘on-device’ AI, meaning processing data directly on devices rather than relying on cloud servers.
This aligns with their privacy-centric approach and ensures faster performance. However, their total number of data scientist postings might be lower compared to Meta.
Big Data in Retail
Walmart is surely a name that pops up first when you think of a leading retail enterprise in the US.
It shines in the retail industry with more than 245 million customers visiting 10,900 stores along with 10 active websites across the globe.
Walmart leverages Big Data to boost sales by enhancing customer emotional intelligence quotients.
What this means is, Big Data is a feather in Walmart’s cap that helps them optimize while customizing their customers’ shopping experiences in their stores, websites, or mobile applications. The broad Big Data ecosystem at Walmart analyzes multiple terabytes of new data and historical data each day.
This includes tracking more than 100 million customers who are either browsing or shopping and analyzing around 100 million keywords for bidding. Their plan is to enhance customer buying experience whilst increasing their logistics efficiency.
Walmart does this by combining 10 different websites into a single website with a 250-node Hadoop cluster. Thus, the data-gathering process is seamless. Then, they work on improving personalization through data analysis.
Now to build this robust infrastructure, it needs an engineering team that is agile and polished with the required skills.
From this data illustration, we can see that Walmart – as expected, stands out from the other retail industry leaders with a staggering 54.9% of hires in data science-related job positions.
The Home Depot follows its steps and posts 34.4% of data science-related jobs. This shows that it is keen to leverage Big Data in its favor. Target on the other hand stands for only 5.6% of data science-related job posts.
Now, if you look at Dollar General, the rate of data science positions is surprisingly low at 5.1%.
However, the size of monthly jobs posted by Dollar General is massive at around 18000. This brings us to our next topic,
Dollar General’s Expansion Trajectory
Dollar General successfully drove its sales up by staying on track with its expansion plans.
Their Q3 net sales rose 2.4% Y-O-Y to $ 9.7 billion as per the reports.
The results of our data analysis show that the net sales increase was primarily driven by positive sales contributions from new stores.
As they expand their store locations in 19,643 different areas in the continental United States & Mexico, the foot traffic and sales also rise simultaneously.
Dollar General can now reach a broader range of customers by opening new stores that the company can leverage to tap into new markets and amplify its brand awareness.
Plus, freshly opened stores complement the existing ones, synergize their marketing efforts, and supply chain logistics to gain a competitive advantage in the retail landscape.
It is on its way to becoming the new champ in terms of store reach and accessibility outmatching Walmart. Considering, it maintains relevance and adapts to changing consumer preferences seamlessly.
With that being said, let’s look at the job posting highlights of retail stores.
In just the first quarter of 2023, Dollar General had already posted 19240 jobs. Then, in Q2, it posted 4498 jobs, followed by 11276 posts in Q3, and it ended with 3540 posts in Q4.
The most demanding job titles in the retail industry are all sales and management-related. Such as Associate Sales Manager, Lead Sales Associate (part-time/full-time), Store Manager, Store Attendant, Warehouse Supervisor, Store Non-Food Manager, Store Food Manager, etc. The highest number of sales associates is at the astonishing number of 10975 posts.
Thus, Dollar General stands out from the rest for the frequent job postings in a huge volume due to the boost in new store locations.
Texas Roadhouse’s Stellar Growth
The American Steakhouse chain, Texas Roadhouse is the fastest-growing restaurant with 686 locations across 49 states in 2023.
With the data we have collected, we have analyzed that their hiring trend is raging with high numbers in every possible job position.
From management & manufacturing, sales & business development, and IT-related. Especially in the blue-collar positions such as host, dishwasher, and server.
This shows that their business is ascending to exponential growth and it needs staff to handle day-to-day operations.
Brand Finance, the valuation consulting firm has even stated in its Restaurants 25 report for 2023 that Texas Roadhouse’s brand value is at $2.3 billion which is an increase of 56%.
Analysts say that this surge occurred because the company stuck to its growth strategy.
Now, from our analysis of the jobs posted by food chain companies, it is clear that Texas Roadhouse overtakes its competitors predominantly during August and October.
From July to August, the reason for the spike could be seasonal demand led by the “American Sentiment”.
The Fourth of July is known as Independence Day in the US. Celebrating the occasion, the number of customers is at an all-time high. So there’s an ample requirement for staff to take care of and serve the guests.
Thus, this could justify the rise in job postings during and after the month.
Conclusion
Coming to the end of our topic, the first thing we need to understand is that job posting data is only one piece of the puzzle.
To thoroughly leverage competitive insights, you must consider other factors like:
- Recent research publications and patents: These reveal the direction of your competition’s research efforts and potential areas of focus.
- Investments in AI startups and collaborations: These showcase partnerships and potential acquisitions that could shape their future AI capabilities.
- Public statements and roadmaps: Leaders’ pronouncements and strategic plans offer insights into their long-term vision for the company.
This combines these elements with job posting data from Grepsr. Hence, you can paint a richer picture of your competitor’s business goals and hiring strategy.
