Further improvements have been made to Geocoding for a major data source in New Zealand and Australia job postings data. This latest update furthers the work in this space from September as described here: https://kb.lightcast.io/en/articles/11866696-geocoding-in-the-australia-and-new-zealand-postings
What is changing?
Lightcast will be further upgrading its location coding process to Google geocoding, with targeted improvements in data sourced from specific major posting sources.
When will this change take place?
This change will take place on the 19th December 2025 for Talent Analyst Global, Data Share and Data Feed customers. The change will be reflected in Labour Insight on 20th December 2025.
What will this change mean for me?
Changes for locations to Google Geocoding in the Australia and New Zealand Postings will cause posting volume changes between March 2025 and September 2025 inclusive. The overall volume shift is:
Month | AU Delta | NZ Delta |
2025-03 | 6.20% | 13.05% |
2025-04 | 17.26% | 1.78% |
2025-05 | 5.12% | 10.43% |
2025-06 | 6.11% | -4.41% |
2025-07 | 5.29% | 1.54% |
2025-08 | 4.06% | -2.08% |
2025-09 | 6.70% | 6.82% |
This location coding improvement has impacted both city name and SA3/SA4 data elements in generally coding to more specific locations. Using Melbourne as an example, you can see the shift here:
Percentage of Melbourne Postings in Melbourne - Inner SA4 shift example
This chart shows a gradual shift from the Inner SA4 to the surrounding areas beginning in 2020. The trend levels off in 2024 and then drops substantially beginning in March of 2025, which is when data from significant new sources was introduced to the Lightcast job postings database. This significant new source has more specific location information on average than the data that was previously collected.
Geocoding into the future
Another advantage of this further update to location classification is dynamic nature of the city level location taxonomy. As Google continues to improve the granularity and accuracy of their geocoding efforts, these will be automatically reflected in the Lightcast dataset. The result of this will be the number of cities/towns we classify postings to will gradually increase over time.
What are the benefits of this change?
Lightcast's improved location classification will enable:
More accurate locations for postings on the whole.
Increased granularity in location coding, enabling richer analysis for regional and rural locations.
Ongoing granularity improvements are automatically applied to the city/town level location data.
What does this mean for my analysis?
Overall posting counts have shifted, but the trends remain constant. This is primarily a technical change in processing to create a better on-going experience with Lightcast job postings.
Change in overall volume for new postings: Customers will expect to see some variations in specific location counts.
More noticeable changes potential in specific analyses: In more targeted analyses, especially around locations, customers may see more significant shifts. We have seen a proportional change in all other data elements, but customers may choose to rerun some analysis due to this. This is most important in those cases where specific volume of postings matters more than trends and relative volume measures more frequently utilized.
Why am I seeing change in numbers?
Unique locations help us to deduplicate postings.
As we are increasing the number of locations we are able to successfully match postings to, customers will see changes in posting counts in our historic data. This change only impacts postings from March to September 2025.