What is changing?
Lightcast's improved postings deduplication processes, released in the UK on 17 November 2023, results in more accurate and robust reporting on the number of postings in the economy and that a given company has.
When will this change take place?
For the UK this change will take place on the 17th November
What will this change mean for me?
Total postings counts will show changes across postings history compared to prior to the change.
Specific estimated national annual changes are as follows for new postings:
Year | UK |
2018 | 6% |
2019 | 4% |
2020 | 3.5% |
2021 | 3.5% |
2022 | 1.5% |
Jan.2023 - Oct.2023 | 1.5% |
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 June and August.
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.
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: Customers will expect to see some variations in specific company counts.
Customers using non-staffing filters will see a decrease in volumes nationally, due to a better coding within this filter view of direct employers.
Customers will see an increase in staffing & recruitment companies volume 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.
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 normalise the company name.
Why am I seeing change in numbers?
From the 17th November we will be better normalising company names, for direct employers, as well as staffing/recruitment companies.
As we are better normalizing company names, and identifying the nature of the companies as direct employers or staffing/recruiters. We are able to use this to be able to better match and find duplicate postings within each company.
For direct employers we use the company name as part of the deduplication process.
For staffing/recruitment companies, as these companies can be hiring for a variety of clients, company name plays a less important role in the process and other key identifiers are used to deduplicate postings, such as Title, Location and Skills.
What is your deduplication process?
The deduplication process can be found here
What is the difference between new and active postings?
More information on this can be found here