Labour market analytics is data on which skills employers are hiring, in which cities, and at what salary. It is also called labour market intelligence or talent market data. Workforce planners use it to decide whether to build a skill, by training their own staff, or to buy it, by hiring people who already have it.
The data comes mostly from public sources. The software collects millions of job advertisements every month, from job sites and company career pages. It reads each one, and records the role, the skills asked for, the city, the experience and, where it is shown, the salary. It adds salary surveys, company filings and public online profiles. Then it counts. How many employers are asking for this skill? In which cities? Is demand growing or falling? How many people already have the skill, and what do they earn?
Imagine a workforce planner at a global capability centre in Hyderabad. A global capability centre (GCC) is an office in India that a foreign company owns and runs to do its own work. The planner must add 30 data engineers next year. The analytics shows her figures for the last quarter. Employers in Hyderabad posted about 4,000 jobs for data engineers, at a median salary of ₹18 lakh a year for five years' experience. In Coimbatore, employers posted about 500 such jobs, at a median of ₹13 lakh. So fewer employers are competing for data engineers in Coimbatore, and they cost less. But there are also fewer of them to hire.
She then looks at the build option. Her centre has 40 software testers who already write SQL. Training one tester to become a data engineer takes about six months, and costs about ₹1.5 lakh in courses and working time. Training is cheaper, but it is slow, and only some testers will want to move. So she decides to train 15 testers and to hire 15 engineers in Coimbatore. The testers who could move are found through the internal talent marketplace.
Other buyers use the same data in other ways. IT services firms use it to estimate the cost of the people a new deal will need. Recruiters use it to choose where programmatic job advertising should place a job opening. Investors treat job-advertisement counts as one kind of alternative data, because a company that suddenly hires many salespeople may be growing. A company that wants to hire in a country where it has no office can compare salaries there, and then hire through an employer of record (EOR).
Labour market analytics is the outside view of talent intelligence. Talent intelligence studies the company's own people; this data studies everyone else's hiring.