Job Posting Analytics

The Job Posting Analytics report helps you quickly understand employer demand for specific roles or skills by region (click here for the definition of job postings). The report shows: 

• how many job postings or advertisements are being made
• the jobs being sought
• the companies looking for talent
• the intensity of that demand 
• the specific job titles businesses use
• the qualifications associated with those postings
• and the skills that these companies say they need. 

 

How to Use the Report

To use the report, start by selecting a region. This can be a county, MSA, state, or nation. Run the report to see data on all job postings in that region, or use the additional fields to narrow your search. For instance, you can focus on postings related to a particular occupation, job title, company, skill, industry, or keyword. 

After you run the report, these and other filters will be available in a sidebar so you can further refine or modify your search. and select a job title, occupation, employer, industry or skill. 

As an example, the image below shows that we are running the report for Physician Assistants in the Seattle MSA. 

 

Inside the Report

The report starts by indicating that from September 2016 to August 2019, Seattle had 6,542 unique postings (or advertisements) for Physician Assistants and 34,171 total postings. Total job postings is the raw number of online job advertisements we capture, and it includes duplicate postings across a wide array of career sites and job boards. Unique postings is the actual number of job postings, adjusted to account for duplicates. The key thing to note here is that when employers are looking for employees they will post or advertise multiple times across different sites, which creates the duplication. We find unique postings by measuring the number of ads in a fixed location and determining the real demand vs. the advertising intensity. 

The Job Postings Analytics overview also provides posting intensity, which is the ratio of total postings to unique postings. For example, the below screenshot shows a posting intensity of 5:1 for PA jobs in the Seattle MSA. This indicates that for every one open position they advertise for it in five places. 

A high posting intensity could mean that an employer is urgently trying to fill a role or might be having a hard time filling a role, so they are posting in multiple locations to reach a wider audience. Finally, in the intro we observe that job postings for Physician Assistants tend to stay open for 36 days. 

Median posting duration shows the number of days a job posting is live and accepting applicants in your selected region, occupation, company, etc. In this example, the median number of days is 36, meaning that half of postings stay up longer and half are removed earlier. 

 

Advertised Salary

The graph above shows the number of job postings (for Physician Assistants) that included a salary. Not all job postings include this information–in fact, only 6% of the postings for PAs in Seattle advertised a salary. We can also see that the median advertised salary was $114.7K, which is $10K less than what most PAs make in the area.

 

Regional Breakdown

The map shows us the three counties that comprise the Seattle MSA. We can see that King County, the largest of the three, had the most unique job postings between September 2016 and August 2019. 

 

Sample Postings

Next the report pulls in a sample of the full text job postings being used in the analysis. This is a useful part of the analysis because it provides visibility into the actual job postings that underlie the report. As we curate and extract data from these postings it’s helpful to have access to the raw posting for a frame of reference. 

By clicking on any one of these posting samples, we can see the full text of the posting. The “Jump to Job Postings List” link at the top will bring us to a list of the top 50 job postings for PAs in our selected MSA. 

 

Active Postings Trend

The report also offers a look at historic trends for the postings in question. This helps establish historical context so you can get a sense for growth, decline, or seasonality associated with the postings. You can choose to see monthly trends or more immediate trends over the last 30 days.

Here we can see the number of postings for Physician Assistants in Seattle from February 25 to March 25. Hovering over any plotted point will show the number of job postings that were active that day in both the most recent year and in earliest year in your selected timeframe. For example, hovering over March 8 shows that there were 330 postings on March 8, 2020, and 393 postings on March 8, 2019, which is a -16% decline in postings.

For further analysis, you can jump to the Job Postings Table by clicking the hyperlink in the upper right-hand corner. 

 

Education and Experience

The charts below show the required education level and minimum experience listed in job postings for Physician Assistants. We can see that 9% of postings require a Master’s degree, and 14% of postings require 0-1 years of experience to qualify for the position.

 

Postings vs Hires 

In the next section of the report we see the monthly job posting activity compared with the monthly hires for that same position. Again, the job postings come from ads that we track across many internet sources. The hires data comes from a different source, called the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI). There is likely some mismatch between these data points, but we believe it is helpful to see how many postings are made vs. how many hires the government actually tracks for these positions. This often shows an interesting discrepancy: in this example, though employers averaged some 500 job postings related to physicians assistants per month, they only actually hired some 40 per month (shown in blue). This is frequently the case with health care or IT positions. Postings usually far exceed hiring for such jobs.  

 

Who Is Hiring:

This section shows the top companies posting, top cities posting, top occupations (based on mapping job titles to the nearest occupation code), top job titles, and the top industries associated with the titles. The companies are ranked by number of unique postings (indicated by the horizontal blue bars) and also show posting intensity and median posting duration: 

 

This chart demonstrates the value of combining multiple perspectives on the economy together in one place. For instance, we see that Barton & Associates posted the most open positions (766 unique postings) between Sep 2016 and August 2019, but Virginia Mason Medical Center had greater posting intensity in that time frame. This could mean that there are more roles to fill at Barton while Virginia Mason is working harder to fill the open positions they have. More follow up or outreach to the companies themselves could help validate why exactly this is the case, but this data helps us start the conversation and can guide the next steps. 

 

In-Demand Skills

The Skills section of the report shows the frequency of the top hard skills and the top common skills appearing in job postings as compared to those appearing in workforce profiles. 

These diagrams show that while many employers may be asking for a certain skill, the profiles available to them do not necessarily reflect that demand; in this case, almost 30% of employers are looking for physician assistants with experience in primary care, but less than 10% of profiles list primary care as an acquired skill.  Internal medicine, on the other hand, is listed in job postings much less frequently than it appears in profiles, suggesting that physician assistant positions are oversaturated with this particular skill. 

 

Qualifications

The following graph indicates the most popular qualifications that appear in job postings.

Qualifications are the certifications that are administered by third-party entities (schools, government, industries, etc.) that acknowledge a body of skills and abilities, such as Certified Nursing Assistant or Family Nursing Practitioner. On the left side of the graph above, we can see the top ten qualifications most frequently listed in postings, while on the right is the number of postings which mention those qualifications. In postings for Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioner is by far the most popular qualification. 

 

Top Sources

Finally, we can see the websites that employers are using to advertise these Physician Assistant job openings in a certain timeframe. From September 2016 through August 2019, the largest percentage of postings were found on Nexxt.com. Selecting the “More” button beneath the graph will show the next ten posting sources. 

We hope this report provides the detailed labor market information you need to make good decisions and drive prosperity for your organization and community. If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact our customer service team here. We’d love to learn more about your work and see how we can help!