Competitive Intelligence: Career Pages

Career pages are an almost unavoidable place that companies tip their hand about go-forward strategy. Why? Because the alternative -- writing bland job descriptions that reveal nothing about the go-forward strategy -- doesn't tend to attract the best and brightest. So, most companies reveal, imply, or allude to exciting plans ahead, sometimes with enough specificity to be useful for competitive intelligence purposes.

Career Page Disclosures - Examples

Here are real-world pieces of competitive intelligence that we've seen revealed in live job descriptions on career pages, that we do not believe had more generally been publicized by the company:

• Claims about a specific number of clients that the firm has, that could not be found elsewhere in their promotional materials. This become an outstanding "reality-check" for one client that had previously over-estimated the portion of the market they had captured.
• Claims about a specific number of clients that the firm has, within a very specific industry list (think "____ of the firms on the ___ list"). This was terrifically useful to a prior client that wanted to understand the specific competitor's segmentation focus.
• Specific target team size for a key team being formed -- in one recent example, an Applied Artificial Intelligence team of twenty. This insight helped a client understand the scale at which they might need to invest in their own team, to be able to keep pace with the competitor's plans.
• Roles involving hardware design, for a company that historically was specifically/only a software company. This was useful to a number of hardward-focused companies that benefited from timely insight into the new competitor that they believed would derive most of their margin from software, leading to a shakeup in the industry's hardware pricing structure.
• Long-stale claims about awards won (job descriptions that cite awards won by the employer, with the most recent award being three years ago). This was useful to a client that wondered whether a previously high-flying competitor had, as suspected, lost some of their momentum.
• Specific information about a team/group that will be working "in office" 5 days/week going forward -- in this particular case, at a company where employer brand is unlikely to attract top talent given that criteria. This was useful to a client wanting to understand how the hiring environment might either favor, or disfavor, their ability to recruit experienced industry professionals.
• Specific office locations that are growing, and not growing -- in one recent example a rapidly-growing India office (many openings), and stagnant offices in the U.S. (very few openings). This was useful to a client wanting to understand the exten of their competitor's appetite (or lack thereof) for competing for onshore talent.

Next Steps

Want an easy way to discover the career pages of all of the competitors in your analysis set? We're standing by to help!.