Crowd Lego Pixabay/mwewringiCIMS has announced a monthly hiring indicator for the US job market.  It is leveraging the anonymised data lake that its customers provide to deliver two statistics that reflect the US jobs market. The first is hiring index that shows the number of job hire in a given month. For March 2018 it was 1.5%, showing a small rise on the previous month.  Second statistic relates to the number of new job openings in a given month, this rose 11.3% in March compared to the previous month. This latter statistic contrasts to the federal government statistic that indicates the number of jobs left vacant at the end of the month.

The hiring indicator site also shows a graph that reflects the trend over a period of time.  The graphs reflect the changes over the last three years, since January 2015. The underlying trend for the hiring index shows a steady growth. It reflects the current confidence in the US economy. iCIMS should add a trend line to show that growth trend. They also compare it to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with the iCIMS statistics showing a steadier line.  This might indicate that the BLS statistics include some statistics from more volatile industries.

Leveraging the data lake

Josh Wright, CFA, Chief Economist at iCIMS (IMage credit Linkedin
Josh Wright, CFA, Chief Economist at iCIMS

iCIMs will release the figures monthly, on the Tuesday ahead of the monthly Employment Situation Report published by the BLS. The March 2018 report due on 6th April. The iCIMS data is based on a database added to by more than 3,500 customers, who add three million job posts a year.  iCIMS has sensibly restricted the statistics to only the US market, where it draws the majority of its data. While iCIMS has an expansive customer base it has not focused down in specific industries, not even separating blue from white collar. It may do so in the future.

Josh Wright, iCIMS chief economist commented: “The Monthly Hiring Indicator is an advance signal of U.S. hiring activity and job growth, based on a painstakingly tested set of iCIMS proprietary data, and we’ll be publishing it ahead of most major labor indicators. Combining breadth of coverage and timeliness of release, our data should be valuable to job-market watchers of all stripes: economists, journalists and HR professionals and business leaders. In addition to trends in job growth, our data can shed light on the hiring process itself – a subject that has traditionally suffered from a lack of data – and the way firms and workers find each other.”

What does this mean

This is a clever move by iCIMs as it shares what many would see as valuable data.  Cloud companies have access to huge data sets and some are leveraging this to benefit themselves and customers.  Workday launched Data as a Service and a benchmarking service to which customers need to opt into.  iCIMs has chosen to demonstrate its market share through a comparison to the Federal statistics.

What customers might be interested in is a more detailed view of how the trends affect their specific market.  It may change the hiring cycles in some companies as they look to hire talent a little earlier than the competition. Wright infers that there may be more services available from the data. What will they deliver? iCIMS would need to provide more visibility about its market segmentation first though. iCIMs is leveraging its size in the US market it will hope to attract more businesses to its software with these indicators.

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