As part of our ongoing efforts to improve Australia and New Zealand data, Lightcast is continuing to make improvements to geocoding for these countries.
What is changing?
Lightcast will be upgrading its location coding.
When will this change take place?
This change will take place on 31 July 2026 for Talent Analyst Global, Data Share and Data Feed customers. The change will be reflected in Labour Insight on 3 August 2026.
What will this change mean for me?
Total postings counts will show changes across postings history compared to prior posting volumes. Active postings will experience similar monthly changes.
The estimated national annual variations are minor prior to July 2025, with approximate increases per month as stated below:
Month | Australia expected % change | New Zealand expected % change |
June 2025 | 1% | 3% |
July 2025 | 3% | 6% |
August 2025 | 5% | 7% |
September 2025 | 5% | 5% |
October 2025 | 6% | 3% |
November 2025 | 6% | 7% |
December 2025 | 7% | 11% |
January 2026 | 7% | 11% |
February 2026 | 7% | 10% |
March 2026 | 7% | 9% |
April 2026 | 7% | 11% |
May 2026 | 7% | 14% |
June 2026 | 6% | 13% |
What are the benefits of this change?
Lightcast's improved location classification better codes across more ambiguous locations that are found across websites structured data.
What does this mean for my analysis?
Overall posting counts have shifted, but the trends remain constant.
Consistent top line trends: Looking at the change from a ranking/distribution standpoint we see the same/similar rankings in occupations, skills, titles.
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, customers may see more significant shifts. Specifically Lightcast was able to better integrate locations from some government employers such as State of Victoria, State of New South Wales, State of South Australia, Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand, New Zealand Government, where customers will see a notable change.
Please contact [email protected] if more information is needed.
How does geocoding work?
During aggregation, we scrape structured text that represents the raw location provided by advertisers. Google's geocoding service then processes these raw city inputs.
These cities are subsequently rolled up to a Google-provided region. Please note that Google geocoding continually updates, which can occasionally result in new cities with few postings being presented, or in certain cities or regions not being populated.
Why am I seeing change in numbers?
We are better able to distinguish the countries, regions and cities of the postings so that they can be accurately added to the dataset.
What other upgrades have you done to Australia and New Zealand data?
Lightcast has been upgrading the data set as part of our long term investment in Australia and New Zealand labour market data. Recently this has included: