Overview
What is changing?
Lightcast's imroved postings deduplication processes, released in the United States on November 3, 2023, results in more accurate and robust reporting on the number of postings in the economy and that a given company has.
Timeline: When will this change take place?
This change was deployed on November 3, 2023.
Impact
What will this change mean for me?
Total postings counts will show small changes across postings history compared to prior to the change.
Specific estimated national annual changes are as follows for new postings:
Year | Diff |
2018 | -0.4% |
2019 | -0.4% |
2020 | 0.7% |
2021 | 0.6% |
2022 | -1.0% |
2023 (January - September) | -1.2% |
For 2023 monthly counts, estimated postings count change:
Month | Diff |
January 2023 | -1.5% |
February 2023 | 0.2% |
March 2023 | -0.5% |
April 2023 | 1.3% |
May 2023 | -1.4% |
June 2023 | -2.9% |
July 2023 | -2.6% |
August 2023 | -0.8% |
September 2023 | -2.4% |
Active postings will experience the same annual changes. For 2023, we were able to better identify when postings were live during that month. Thus creating a shift in the trend line between April and July.
What does this mean for my analysis?
Overall, the impact on analyses is minimal. 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.
Consistent trends: Looking at the change from a ranking/distribution standpoint we see the same/similar rankings in occupations, skills, titles and all other data points as we did previously.
Minimal change in overall volume for new postings: Users will expect to see some variations in specific company counts
More noticeable changes potential in specific analyses: In more targeted analyses, especially around companies, 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.
Technical Notes
Why are you changing the deduplication process?
Lightcast has invested in better postings classification. With this, we have taken steps to use these improvements as part of our deduplication process which has largely remained untouched since inception.
What are you changing in the deduplication process?
We are changing one item:
The input for Company Name. In the new deduplication we will use our most up to date company classifier to identify and normalize the company name.
Why am I seeing decreased numbers?
As we are better normalizing company names, we are able to use this to be able to better match and find duplicate postings within each company.
What is your deduplication process?
The deduplication process can be found here
How does your expiration process work?
The expiration process can be found here