Employment ads give it all away

A very useful source of information when doing competitive intelligence work are employment advertisements.  While any organization or company will often keep the description of themselves pretty polished and non-internal in their marketing and PR communication, there is a lot more that is both explicitly said and written between the lines in their job ads.

This is particularly useful when researching non-listed companies. In my experience, companies don’t seem to think about competitors as being among the readers of their employment ads, judging from how many of them are written. Also, it can be a difficult balance act to reveal enough to attract candidates, while not giving away details that provide competitors with too much insight.

A single employment advertisement can provide a lot, and a series of ads over time even more. Things such as organizational structure and chains-of-command can be mapped up, even for companies and organizations who otherwise are very discrete with that type of information. New technology development projects can be spotted as the company hires new specialists. The size of teams and departments in terms of coworkers is often written in the clear, for the team or department in question. Salary levels and in turn approximated total cost of staff is another thing that can be deduced by collecting ads over time.  The plain frequency of employment ads publications and the variation over time is an indicator of the state of business: are they growing and expanding business, or not?

For software development companies, the programming skills and programming language knowledge demanded will tell alot about what the company is up to. In some countries, it is required by law to list a name and phone number of a workers’ union representative. That name can in turn be a key to additional information from LinkedIn or Facebook.

So, my advice in summary:

• monitor your competitors’ career pages on the web,
• monitor their ads on Monster.com and similar services,
• collect the ads they publish,
• keep good track of when they were published and when applications were due,
• process and organize the bits of information found in the ads
• combine the information with facts from other sources