Swiss labor market data now available in Jobfeed

Textkernel’s labor market analytics tool Jobfeed is now available for the Swiss job market. Being a multilingual country with higher salaries than other markets and a record-low unemployment rate, Switzerland is a very special labor market to analyze. We have done a deep dive into our data to introduce you to the Swiss job market statistics.

Jobfeed crawls over 1.000 Swiss websites and provides historic data from 130.000 organizations. The tool shows a total number of 270.000 open vacancies in Switzerland with 1,4 open vacancies per jobseeker. This record level of staff shortage is starting to threaten the country’s prosperity according to Swiss media sources. The situation is likely to change for the worse as a huge number of employees is going to retire in the next few years, leaving Switzerland with a lack of 1.2 million workers by 2035.

The Swiss job market in a nutshell

Let’s go for a quick data dive and discover some characteristics of the Swiss labor market that Jobfeed delivers to you with just a few clicks in a personalized and automated way.

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Who is posting jobs in Switzerland?

Jobfeed enables you to differentiate Direct Employers from Staffing organizations which makes it the perfect tool for recruiters trying to generate new business opportunities online. In Switzerland, roughly 34% of the vacancies are published by Staffing Agencies. Compared to other European markets, this percentage for job ads posted by Staffing Agencies is relatively low (roughly 50/50 in Germany or France).

Which positions are most in demand?

Nurses are by far the most needed profession in Switzerland representing over 2% of the Swiss vacancies. If we add the Nursing assistants to this (ranking third) the percentage is even higher with 3.4%. This is a huge issue for the Swiss labor market and the shortage of caregiving professionals might even increase in the following years. Three IT professions (Software Engineers, System Engineers or SAP Consultants) are amongst the Top 10 most needed professions, too.

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Identifying skill trends in Switzerland

Jobfeed covers all the skills that are requested online and makes them analyzable in a user friendly way. With this, you can easily identify skill trends and roles that are in high demand and adapt promptly to market changes. Let’s take a look at the required soft skills for the much needed profession Nurse and compare it with the French and German labor market. It is interesting to see that job ads in Switzerland make less mention of team work or interpersonal skills, but rather highlight the management of stress and adaptability skills.

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Regarding professional skills, Swiss job ads tend to highlight lots of different key areas. Skills like “Multidisciplinary Approach”, “Long-Term Care”, “Nursing” and “Medical Records” are all at roughly 20%. Job descriptions in Germany and France seem to be more general with the very broad skill “Nursing” being by far the most important. 

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About Jobfeed

Jobfeed Switzerland provides realtime market insights which enable you to identify growth opportunities, differentiate from competition and dramatically save time and effort. We power you with excellent market expertise, competitor intel and visibility in rapidly changing trends. So in a few clicks you can:;

• Identify new customers for your staffing services
• React to skill trends and high demand roles
• Keep track of competition 
• Build stronger customer relations 
• Identify gaps in your market share

and much more… 

Check out the new Jobfeed for Switzerland now!

Transforming Your Talent Acquisition Strategy in 2023

Emerging trends in candidate expectations, competitive job advertising, and data-driven capabilities are creating new challenges and opportunities for employers. In this article, Textkernel’s CEO Gerard Mulder demonstrates how recruitment professionals can use data to engage talent more effectively and shares four tips to get your talent acquisition strategy on the path to lasting success in 2023 and beyond.

Talent acquisition professionals are facing mounting challenges as 2023 approaches. “HR leaders now work with unprecedented levels of uncertainty,” Gartner described in September 2022. “A new combination of economic pressures creates talent challenges that HR leaders must confront head on.”

Growing competition for talent is at the root of this uncertainty. Data from our Jobfeed shows the number of vacancies nearly doubled from Q3 2020 to Q3 2022, growing steadily from roughly 10 million to almost 20 million during that time.

Demand for recruiters grew more rapidly than all other jobs combined—with a peak of +200% in Q2 2021—also indicative of employers’ challenges in this area.

Amidst Labor Shortages, It’s a Job Seeker’s Market

Labor shortages represent the third-greatest concern among CEOs globally, second only to rising inflation and COVID-19-related disruptions, The Conference Board® reports. Now, candidates increasingly have their choice of job opportunities.

This challenge will become more pronounced as 2023 progresses. “More organizations (57%) expect increased talent competition over the next six months as of August 2022, compared to 50% in July 2022,” Gartner reports. That means job candidates are more likely to choose employers that are good at advertising their available roles. 

Employers Are Raising the Stakes with Better Benefits

Employers are creating more competitive job advertisements as a result. Jobfeed data shows that benefits such as tuition reimbursement, dental insurance, health insurance, and remote work opportunities are becoming more common in job advertisements across industries.

Even so, only 13% of job opportunities posted online offer some opportunity for remote work, according to Jobfeed. This is woefully insufficient given that 55% of employees who “would prefer to be remote at least three days a week once pandemic concerns recede,” as PwC describes.

Tuition reimbursement, dental insurance, and health insurance offers are growing more common in Healthcare, Technical, Science, and Food Service Roles job advertisements as well, Jobfeed reports. But even these traditional benefits apply to only 27% of all job advertisements, in each case.

Candidate and Employee Experiences Matter

Poor candidate experiences also are more likely to deter applicants from pursuing certain roles when similar opportunities present better ones. Poor employee experiences are more likely to drive existing employees—including yours—to seek out better opportunities, also. “The workforce demands more value from their current organization and expresses a willingness to find it elsewhere if they are not receiving it,” as SAP SuccessFactors describes.

Four Competitive Opportunities for Talent Leaders

Textkernel captures deep insights about job advertisements and employers’ talent acquisition strategies. Unfortunately, many companies continue to involve an outdated “post-and-pray” methodology. Meanwhile, competitive employers are becoming more proactive in how they find and secure key talent themselves.Here are four tips to get your talent acquisition strategy on the path to lasting success.

1. Reduce attrition so you can recruit more effectively

Simply put, there is not enough talent in the market—a problem even the most competitive benefits packages won’t solve. That’s why employers must focus on retaining talent before they invest in recruitment efforts.

As a solution, employers can “invest in a real-time internal talent marketplace” that “draws from existing talent to match employees with company needs in a way that benefits both parties,” as Oracle suggests. Employers who can recruit internally, upskill team members, and promote employees with mission-critical skills can reduce attrition, reduce recruitment costs, and relieve internal pressure as a result.

2. Become data-driven in your strategic approach

Successful recruitment today requires new data-driven tools and strategies. For example, the right candidate and talent data means recruiters can pinpoint the skills they have already in their companies, as well as the skills they actually need to find. With this knowledge, they can answer critical questions about talent acquisition, such as:

• How can we upskill our existing team members before we define the skills we need?
• Which tasks should we outsource instead of assigning them to new hires?
• How will we define new roles before we begin recruiting for them?
•  What are the positions or job titles we should bring to market in our advertising?

3. Be Responsive to Emerging Candidate Priorities

Candidate priorities are evolving in terms of the benefits employers provide. Today, “80% of candidates believe employers should reevaluate the benefits they provide post-pandemic”; but also, “61% are seeking remote work opportunities,” Forbes reports.

Recruiters can respond by highlighting these benefits and company attributes in discussions with candidates. More employers have eliminated location requirements from their job advertisements, for example, potentially opening opportunities to remote or partially remote employees. Employers can identify candidate priorities they should include in advertisements.

4. Improve the Candidate Experience

In addition to improving their companies’ appeal, recruiters can improve the candidate experience to maintain talent interest between the time of engagement and employment. New methods that include the use of automation, personalization, and remote interviews and assessments can help.

For example, matching solutions can integrate with employers’ career pages to automatically match applicants’ CVs with their relevant available jobs. Candidates who upload their CVs enjoy a more personalized and efficient experience, while HR teams spend more time on building relationships rather than on data entry and other manual tasks.

Data Has Become Critical to Successful Recruitment

No matter a recruitment professional’s circumstances, data is critical to success in each of these areas. “HR leaders can use data to more confidently manage these talent dilemmas, and carefully examine organizational values to make informed decisions,” says Gartner.

We offer recruitment professionals the industry’s most robust and accessible collection of labor market intelligence. Our solutions plug into employers systems to help them understand, connect, and analyze data, then standardize their job advertisements for the greatest possible engagement within their target audiences.
Contact us to learn more about how Textkernel can drive your future-focused recruitment strategy.

Only recently, the Nursing and Midwife Council (NMC) reported that the numbers of EU and UK Nurses quitting the NHS outweigh the numbers of newly registered nurses (Oct 2016 – Sep 2017) causing its first drop of numbers in the last four years. The Department of Health expresses no higher concerns about these figures by stressing that it is “a mere 0,2%” decrease by ca. 700.000 registered nurses in the UK. However, NHS leaders do not share this point of view and describe these numbers as “alarming” since they already struggle to fill vacancies in respond to the continues rise in demand. But how exactly does it look on the demand side?

The relentless rise in demand for Nurses

In comparison to other European Countries ( Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium) the UK has both the lowest number of nurses per inhabitant and the most vacancies posted online. The number of online vacancies between the year 2015-2016  and 2016-2017 increased by 17,6%, which assumably lies within the average compared to the other countries: Germany has the highest increase in demand, then Belgium, the UK, Netherlands and the lowest increase was found in France. However, with regards to the already high number of online vacancies for nurses in the UK, the increase of the total number of vacancies per inhabitants is the highest compared to the other EU countries of this analysis.

The high demand for nurses shown in this analysis underpins the concerns of the NHS. Upon an increasingly ageing and growing (last year 400.000 new inhabitant) nation this trend could have severe consequences on securing an appropriate healthcare system for the UK.

You can download a .pdf version of the infographic here. For the .jpg version click on the image below or download it here.

Analysing nearly 1,5 million job postings

In order to gain insights into UK nursing job market online and it’s comparison to other European countries, we set out to analyse millions of jobs published online and collected by Jobfeed over a 2-year period in 5 European countries: UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany.

Thanks to the build-in Analytics module of Jobfeed we were able to quickly define the perimeter of the areas to be surveyed, de-duplicate repeatedly posted job offers and extract data from nearly 1,5 million unique jobs published between the 1 November 2015 and the 31 of October 2017.. The resulting list of unique vacancies, excluding franchise, internships/postgraduate positions, voluntary work, freelance jobs and apprenticeships, is the source on which these analyses have been performed.

About Jobfeed

Numbers come from Jobfeed, Textkernel’s searchable job database for lead generation, competitive insight and labour market analysis. Jobfeed offers a current and historic overview of online jobs in the UK as well as in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium.

Jobfeed is a valuable source of information and a unique analytical and acquisition tool for recruitment and staffing agencies, job boards, outplacement and research organisations. For more information or a free trial, please visit www.textkernel.com/jobfeed.

Textkernel just published the infographic: The UK job market in Q2 2016, based on numbers from Jobfeed, the searchable job database for lead generation, competitive insight and labour market analysis.

<infographic>

For this report, Textkernel analysed over 8.3 million job adverts posted in Q2 2016 across the UK web found by Jobfeed. After identifying and removing duplicates as well as positions for franchises, internships/graduate positions, voluntary work, freelance jobs and apprenticeships, over 2.2 million jobs remained on which these analyses have been performed.

Sales and Trading overtakes IT and becomes the largest job category

Sales and trading has become the largest job category in the UK with 12.2% of all jobs. IT, who held 12.7% of all jobs last year, loses 1.6% market share and drops to the second position. Healthcare shows a very large increase in jobs. It gains 1.9% market share and climbs to place 3, at the expense of Administration and Customer service.

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The most requested professions also represent these job categories. in the second quarter of 2016, Sales manager is the number 1 requested job, followed by Nurse and the Customer service agent. Curiously, the Software engineer only appears on place 10.

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Jobs per country

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While around 84% of the population lives in England, 91.6% of all jobs posted in Q2 are located in England. England even grew 0.6% in market share compared to last year. Scotland shows a loss in market share of jobs going from 5.4% to 4.5% market share. Wales remained stable while Northern Ireland also shows an increase (+0.4%) in market share. Unsurprisingly, the top 5 cities with jobs are all in England. Edinburgh (Scotland) follows on place 6.

About Jobfeed

Numbers come from Jobfeed, Textkernel’s searchable job database for lead generation, competitive insight and labour market analysis. Jobfeed offers a current and historic overview of online jobs in the UK as well as in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium. Jobfeed is a valuable source of information and a unique analytical and acquisition tool for recruitment and staffing agencies, job boards, outplacement and research organisations. For more information or a free trial, please visit www.textkernel.com/jobfeed.

For automated matching between jobs and candidates, skill-recognition (in resumes and Job-ads) is essential for making the best possible matches. Over the last few years, Textkernel worked on automated skill-extraction and -normalisation for many languages. The technology is starting to mature and it is finding its way to our customers and into our products.
Bauke Visser, Textkernel’s Data Consultant, tells about his Innovation Week project in which he 3D representation of these skills.

By Bauke Visser

There are many ways ways to analyse these thousands of skills in a way that brings value to customers. Possible areas of interest might be:

• Relatedness between skills (which skills occur together frequently)
• Identification of skills that are most valuable for a certain profession
• Identification of skills that are emerging and which are disappearing

Relatedness between skills can also help when grouping skills together in a classification. For the English language, we currently identify approx. 12.000 unique (normalised) skills. We recognise these from many more spelling-variants and synonyms.

Textkernel Innovation Week 2019 – The 3D Skill Explorer

As part of Textkernel’s annual Innovation Week, we created a 3-dimensional visualisation of these 12.000 skills. It represents the skills in a way that relatedness in the job-market results in closeness in the visualization.

This innovation is particularly unique because it offers professionals interested in the evolving skill landscape an immediate and visual manner to explore the skill landscape. Recruiters, business strategists and business owners can now get a very in-depth understanding of how skills are interrelated and evolving over time.

Viewers will gain an atmospheric experience within the viewer that provides a constellation of skills. Each dot in a cloud represents one of the 12.000 skills that we extracted from 14 million jobs (this is after deduplication; so the original dataset contains ~100 million job-ads).

The closer the dots are together in the cloud, the more related they are in the labour-market (based on co-occurrence; skills appearing together). The colors represent the frequency; the red skills were mentioned relatively often, and the blue skills less often.

What we did

Information-extraction and -normalisation is at the core of what Textkernel does. We have an internal skill-extraction-service that can process documents with very high throughput. For this project, we extracted the skills from 14 million jobs, along with some essential metadata. To go from a table of 12.000 skills by 14 million jobs, to a list of xyz-coordinates, we used dimensionality-reduction methods called PCA and t-SNE.

Virtual Reality

We were able to make a VR-version of the application as well. The experience surpassed our expectations. One of the critical features is that the image reacts to movements of the head, so the user is able to look around in the skill-space. We were also able to add some basic controls: push a button to control the speed. This video gives an idea of the VR-experience (you will need a VR-viewer for it).

For VR-aficionados, we’d love to share the experience with you.

Interested? Please contact us for more information. We’d love to hear your feedback and your ideas about possible business-applications:

About Bauke Visser:

Bauke has been working as a Data Consultant with Textkernel since 2013. He has a passion for (Labour Market) statistics, complex quantitative problems and demanding customers.

The below video is a snippet of Gerard Mulder, President EMEA at CareerBuilder, discussing how AI can make talent acquisition easier and faster:

“The way I like to summarize is – AI can help us understand the data. And, I don’t mean just a job or a resume, what I mean is understand all the data about a person or about a company in a broader context, across multiple systems that hold really relevant information.”

“By understanding the data, we get the ability to analyze it. And, if you remember what I explained about Deep Learning and its ability to also do predictive analytics, it becomes very interesting to take this data and start, for instance, suggesting things you should learn to progress your career. Or find new opportunities.”

“And finally connecting, because that’s what recruitment is about. How we can do this better with AI is to make sure recommendations between companies and people, or rather jobs to people will become more relevant. Relevancy will make you trust the system more, and trust along with a personalized approach will help drive adoption.”

Are you a staffing company looking to adopt AI technology to help find the best talent quicker? Then our eBook on ramping up junior recruiters with domain knowledge is a must-read.

Or if you’re at a global employer you won’t want to miss why Internal Mobility is Critical to your Talent Strategy CHRO.

Textkernel is proud to deepen our working relationship with SAP SuccessFactors! Partnered since 2013, our Apply-with technology is already available and used by SuccessFactors clients to improve their candidate experience and boost application rates.

Now we’re bringing a wider range of our advanced AI-powered technology to SAP SuccessFactors clients allowing them to:

• Match before posting – Your database is full of good candidates, why search and pay externally? Saves you money and time by automatically searching your entire talent pool.
• Automated shortlisting – When posting a job you want to find the best applications immediately. This is why Textkernel’s Match can create an automated shortlist in SAP SuccessFactors in one click.
• Never lose a good candidate – Placing your second-best candidates has never been easier. Now you can match directly from candidate profiles SAP SuccessFactors and automatically discover additional matching jobs.
• Automated alerts for critical job profiles – You may have certain critical job profiles that your business regularly needs to fill. Now you can create a search query matching these job profiles and receive automatic notifications for incoming talent.

Recent surveys of CEO confidence worldwide identified a common theme – a notable dip in the optimism of our most senior corporate leaders and a movement towards defensive moves to protect their business.

According to PWC, 30% of CEOs anticipated a decline in global GDP growth- an increase of 5% on the previous years’ survey. This was accompanied with an expected negative impact on their own growth prospects [Source: PWC, 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey, February 27th, 2019].

At Textkernel, we support HR leaders who are looking to invest in AI-powered technologies to help ramp up their talent acquisition strategy – still key to remaining competitive, while firmly limiting exploding costs to hire external talent.

Below are a few of the top tips for CHROs looking to bolster their talent strategy in anticipation of lower organizational growth.

1 ) Dramatically reduce hiring costs by filling more open vacancies with internal talent.

The problem: Companies are predominantly filling open vacancies with external hires, which is not only dramatically driving up the cost-per-vacancy, but is fuelling discontentment and worse – disengagement – amongst current staff. This is confirmed by a recent report by the Harvard Business Review which highlights the extent of the problem [Source: Harvard Business Review, May-June 2019, Your Approach To Hiring Is All Wrong].

The solution: Transform your hiring approach to leverage talent already within your reach. AI-powered sourcing and matching technology enables employees to quickly, easily submit their application information and receive proactive alerts when matching roles and projects come available. This will allow you to fill more open roles with existing employees that will in turn lower your cost-per-hire and also reduce onboarding and time-to-ramp into new roles.

Learn more about why an internal skills economy is vital to your HR talent strategy and the #futureofwork

2) Keep your recruiting team streamlined but effectively tooled to handle scale.

The problem: Recruiting teams are expected to ‘do more with less’. Delivering high quality candidates to hiring managers requires more heavy-lifting that is visible to most parts of the organization.

The solution: The good news is that advanced semantic search technology can help arm recruitment teams with domain expertise often required to quickly zero in on the most promising candidates, develop a shortlist, and allow your recruiters to focus on the value only they can bring – sell your employer brand to the prospective candidate. The outcome is dramatically shortened time-to-hire and the ability to refocus available recruiters on truly strategic hires.

Learn more about how to streamline and empower your HR team with AI-powered technology.

3) Provide employee portals that help identify new opportunities – both internal and external to the organization.

The problem: Sadly, despite best intentions to avoid layoffs, sometimes the inevitable conclusion is drawn that there are redundant skills, oversupply of talent or simply not enough business demand to justify high personnel numbers and associated costs. In today’s ever more socially connected and networked world, firing personnel en masse is considered an option of last resort and avoided at all costs. Not only can it lead to substantial costs, but the cost and negative impact to one’s employer brand and internal employee disengagement can quickly add up.

The solution: Employers can do more to support the offboarding of employees by offering them the ability to search for new potential employment – both inside and external to the company. Simply by uploading their application data in one-click they can receive matching job offers from within your organization and also from external employers. While no employee wants to learn that they are no longer of value, employers can offer more assistance to ease the burden of looking for new opportunities elsewhere.

Learn more about how to speed up the outplacement process with Textkernel’s labour market intelligence tool, Jobfeed.

Who We Are

Since 2001 Textkernel has been delivering AI-powered technology to companies looking to better connect people and jobs. We work with over 1,000 HR visionaries worldwide who want to build the future of work through advanced technology and deliver more talent-driven value to their organizations.

Interested to learn more? Contact us!