What is happening and when?
In June 2025, Lightcast will be adding new sources to the Australia and New Zealand data sets. The new data will be available via Snowflake on June 6th. It will be exposed in Labour Insight from June 9th.
The new sources will impact the dataset from March 2025 in Australia and January 2025 in New Zealand.
What should clients expect?
Volumes - There will be a large increase in posting volumes, around 100% increase for Australia and 80% for New Zealand. This will affect time series analysis. Please reach out to your Account Manager for advice on how to best adjust for this increase.
Recall - While we have seen a large lift in posting volumes, some data elements have seen lower recall rates. For example, salary and education fields have seen small drops in recall rate due to the nature of the postings collected from these new sources. Further, company recall will also decrease between 5-10%. We will be further working on standardising the data we are collecting from these new sources to improve the overall recall during the next few update cycles.
Top rankings - The top 10 rankings in these areas show minimal changes.
Company - Overall, the inclusion of these new sources has resulted in better representation of companies across Australia and New Zealand. LOT - While the overall occupation ‘shape’ of the dataset is largely consistent, we have observed increases in occupations such as Vehicle mechanics and Construction roles. Overall, the dataset now shows better alignment against published government measures of the labour market
Locations - In Australia, the Sunshine Coast is better represented. Other SA4 locations have minimal change. For New Zealand, Whangarei is better represented.
Skills - Skills categories and average skills per posting are consistent. The top 100 skills show larger shifts, with better representation of Construction skills in particular.
ANZSIC - Changes in the top industries are stable with no large shifts seen in the top 25. As in other areas, we observe increases in the Construction industry.
Why are we doing this?
We are making this change to bring our customers the best possible postings data to more fully represent the economy in these areas. While we appreciate this is a large change to the dataset, the inclusion of these large sources will enable deeper analysis, better insights, and a more actionable dataset overall.
Additional Information
A full change report showing specific changes in the data is available for Australia and New Zealand at the bottom of this article.
If clients have any concerns please contact your Account Manager and/or [email protected] - Our team will happily provide further details and advice on how best to move forward with these changes.