How to Use Public Web Data for Talent Intelligence and Sourcing

Employee and job posting data are great sources of information to enhance talent intelligence and boost talent sourcing. In this article, I will explain how public web data can help you grow your business or enhance your HR platform.

If you’re looking to boost your business growth, you can use public web data to better understand hiring and expansion needs as well as significantly improve chances of finding the best-fit talent for an open position.

If you’re looking to build or improve your HR platform, you can use employee data to ingest additional data to your platform and increase your coverage. Also, you can use employee and job posting data to find the best talent for your clients by analyzing multiple job descriptions of the same position and checking for common patterns regarding skills, qualifications, etc.

Keep reading further to dive deeper into these benefits and see some unique insights I’ve gathered from data experts.

What is employee data?

Employee data refers to information about professionals. This type of data could be collected from public web sources such as LinkedIn, AngelList, Crunchbase, and more. It provides a lot of data points, including but not limited to a professional’s name, work experience, education, job title, job location, social media connections, skills, and more.

What is job posting data?

Job posting data refers to information that could be collected from public web sources such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and more. It provides a lot of data points, including but not limited to a job title, location, employment type, open position count, job description, and more.

What is talent intelligence and sourcing?

The main focus of this article is on talent intelligence and talent sourcing.

Talent intelligence entails collecting and analyzing data about your past and present candidates, employees, and the competition’s workforce. Aside from only analyzing the data, talent intelligence can be used to improve recruiting.

Talent sourcing involves discovering, evaluating, and interacting with potential candidates to fill an open position.

How can you make the most of employee and job posting data?

Below, I will explain how employee and job posting data can help companies and HR platforms enhance talent intelligence and sourcing.

Boost your business growth

Talent intelligence allows companies to better understand their hiring needs and find the right talent according to their skills and qualifications. However, it requires a lot of talent data. That’s where employee and job posting data come in handy.

Here are several ways how you can use the data to stimulate your business growth.

1. Improve your talent based on benchmark criteria

You can compare your employee to a job ad posted by your competitors and see what skills and qualifications they expect from a candidate. If there is a valuable skill requirement that wasn’t in your job ad, you can offer courses to your employee and help them gain that skill.

It helps optimize and upskill your existing workforce without looking for new talent. For this use case, you would most likely need to do a qualitative analysis of the “description” data point.

2. Enhance team distribution

With employee data you can use several data points, such as title and company name, to see how your better-performing competitor distributes its team and generate insights that could enhance your own strategic talent allocation.

Maybe they have more salespeople who drive more revenue and focus less on social media presence, or maybe it’s the opposite. Either way, by doing such research on several of your competitors, you might notice a trend and find an optimal way to improve your workforce.

3. Find more best-fit talent for open positions

If you’re looking to expand your workforce and hire new talent, employee data can help you do it faster and more efficiently. By working with a public web data provider you would receive employee data which you can use to generate a list of candidates based on their skills, experience, location, education, and more.

It eliminates the hassle of manual search and waiting for the right candidates to apply for the position. With employee data, you can take an active approach and fill your vacant positions faster.

The most useful data points to use for talent sourcing would be the ones indicating the location, industry, and job title of the employee, as well as the name of the company they worked at.

Enhance your HR platform

Talent intelligence platforms can open up new horizons by integrating employee and job posting data. For example, it becomes possible to match people to open positions, enhance your understanding of the labor market, and enable strategic workforce planning.

Match candidates to open positions

By identifying job requirements and candidate skills and experience, you can match people to open positions more effectively. With this solution, talent intelligence platforms can provide the best talent to their clients.

“The first step is finding a candidate, which isn’t all that difficult. The second step is identifying the candidate’s intent to switch jobs, which is more challenging. Changes in the candidate’s description, the addition of new recommendations, and the change of any parameters in general signal a pretty strong intent that the person is open to new job offers. Also, if the person has been working in one company for around 5 years, it could also signal that they might be stuck in their current position and would be open to new offers.”

- Ugnius Zasimauskas, Coresignal’s data expert

I'll take Coresignal as an example of a data provider and explain how you can check the profiles for changes:

1. Coresignal DOESN’T refresh employee profiles that haven’t changed since last month. Therefore, if the profile wasn’t updated and no additional recommendations had been added, it indicates low intent to switch jobs.

   
   

2. Coresignal DOES refresh the employee profiles that changed any of their profile parameters. Therefore, it means that the person might be looking for new challenges and could signal a higher intent to switch jobs.

Improve your understanding of the local labor market

Also, employee and job posting data allow us to better understand the labor market. By scanning the resumes in a certain location (i.e. Washington), you can identify what skills are abundant in a region and it could signal that it's advantageous to place a new office or a new branch there. It indicates that it might be easier to find new talent there and the client's business could grow at above-average rates.

"With job posting data, HR platforms can generate leads and see what companies are hiring and who they hire. This way, you will be able to tell what positions and skills are in demand and offer candidates to your client based on those hiring trends. In general, job posting data allows us to understand the overall job market better."

- Martynas Simanauskas, Coresignal's data expert

Plan your workforce more strategically

Strategic workforce planning is another benefit that employee and job posting data enable for talent intelligence platforms. With it, you will be able to predict your client's future hiring needs based on the data you collect about similar companies in the industry. With job posting data you will be able to see how another company expands and anticipate similar behavior from your client. The best way to track the expansion with data is to constantly check if the company puts out any new job ads and see their titles, locations, and descriptions. This way, you can convert a one-timer to a regular client and grow both of your businesses.

"Monitoring competitors can be used as a benchmark for talent intelligence platforms to drive their client's company growth. For example, if the client's competitor of a similar size has shown expansion in the sales and marketing departments, it's a strong signal that the client's company will need to expand those departments, too."

- Martynas Simanauskas, Coresignal's data expert

Increase coverage

Talent sourcing platforms require huge amounts of data to be able to provide best-fit candidates to their clients. Simply put, the more data about professionals you have, the better is the chance that your database will contain the best talent for a certain position.

Data is the fundamental ground upon which talent-sourcing platforms are built. They mostly depend on data coverage and freshness. Once you have ingested the data into your talent-sourcing platform, then it’s possible to look for ways to enable unique features that will make you stand out from the competition.

“Employee data could enhance the understanding of a good candidate. For example, the employee that helped raise a company from the ground and the employee that continued the growth are two very different employees with different skill sets and ambitions.”

- Ugnius Zasimauskas, Coresignal’s data expert

Final thoughts

Employee and job posting data help both companies and talent intelligence platforms make the most of talent sourcing. Companies can use it to find better candidates for open positions and enable data-driven hiring decisions, whereas HR platforms can provide their clients with best-fit talent and significantly improve their workforce while saving them a great deal of time and money.

However, working with public web data, although beneficial, requires a certain level of expertise in data science. If you don’t know how to proceed with data, I also wrote a guide explaining how to prepare for working with public web data.

Also published here.