Using hiring activity data as a signal for future business growth is the most common investment use case for aggregating online job postings. But do other use cases exist for this type of data? For example, can it tell us a) how effective companies are at hiring highly demanded skills, b) whether any of their facilities have suspended operations or even c) a clearer picture of the economic activity in opaque markets? In this piece, we review the landscape of vendors providing job market data, outline possible use cases and discuss its limitations.

Job postings provide detailed information on the types of skills employers are looking for and who those employers are. Broadly speaking, this suggests the most applicable use cases are for 1) identifying companies, sectors or regions with rising growth potential, and 2) analysing skill-specific labour demand trends (a pertinent example being the increasing demand for data scientists at investment firms!). At Neudata, we believe that job postings data is a relatively untapped source of information for investors, and many use cases remain to be explored.