Where is the data for the talent market coming from?

There are different types of data sources for collecting information on compensation. “Source” here is referring to raw data providers, not aggregators. Typically, raw data is obtained through self-reporting sites, job postings, surveys, and other means, such as job interviews, recruiters, etc. A single source is never sufficient because each source on its own is incomplete. Let’s explore some of these sources to find out where the talent market data is coming from.

Job boards and search engines

These are websites where companies advertise job vacancies. Job posts on these websites share information about the job, skills required, and often compensation packages offered by the company. There are various types of job boards – global, country-based, industry-specific or niche boards, and other platforms.

1. Global job boards

These job boards advertise jobs worldwide. For example, Indeed, Glassdoor, and Nexxt are commonly used job boards. Often, jobs posted on these websites also contain information about compensation packages along with the job profile.

These job boards post jobs in a specific geographical area. For example, infojobs.net displays jobs based only in Spain, and CV.ee displays jobs based only in Estonia. Generally, the percentage of job offers that contain salary information varies depending on the country. For instance, in Spain, only 3% of job offers have salary data, while in the US, the percentage is 10%.

These job boards advertise jobs in specific industries. For example, Dice advertises jobs for tech and engineering professionals, Stack Overflow advertises jobs for developers, and AngelList advertises jobs for startups. Furthermore, sources like Stack Overflow and AngelList are great for gathering data on hot startups and scaleups, although it’s difficult to find data for corporations on these websites.

There are also other platforms that focus on specific types of jobs. For example, Upwork focuses on freelancers and advertises jobs for freelancers. These types of sources contain compensation data for professionals that fall outside the regular full-time professional category.

Altogether, these various job platforms offer a huge amount of data that are used to extract information about the talent market.

Company career websites

Companies’ career websites list all job openings in their organization. Usually, on their career website, they also advertise the benefits and perks of working for their company. For example, Careers at Deloitte is the official global career page of Deloitte. It displays all job openings at Deloitte worldwide and displays the various benefits of working at the company.

Recruitment agency websites

Many recruitment agencies have their own job boards, and these job boards offer another source of data for the talent market. Some of these companies have very extensive job boards, which can be location-specific. Some examples are Hays, Page Personnel, and Robert Walter.

Public salary surveys

There are public salary surveys such as this spreadsheet where people voluntarily add their compensation data. These independent salary surveys provide a wealth of data. There are several other public salary surveys like this. By analyzing this data, trends can be identified to guide salary models.

Other sources

This is not an exhaustive list of data sources, and there are many others out there. Recruiters often share job postings in Slack communities, as just one example. For instance, BCN Engineering is a slack community where participants oftentimes advertise job posts that share information about the job as well as compensation packages offered.

Other compensation data websites, such as levels.fyi and companies that publish their salaries, such as buffer.com, offer verified salary data. Moreover, some of these sources (e.g., levels.fyi) contain information about other types of compensation, such as bonuses and stock options, that is usually not found in other sources of data. Data from such verified sources helps increase the accuracy of the compensation statistics recruiters use.

All these sources taken into account offer a complete picture of the talent market in any area. Taking advantage of this insight is how Talentup.io came to be. TalentUp extracts data from all these external sources, along with analysis of professional social networks, and brings them together into a single platform. This enables TalentUp to offer information on talent supply and demand, compensation, and the competitiveness of the talent market. 

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