Navigating Niche Roles: Using Emsi Burning Glass Skills & Keywords to Build a Specialized Search

What is a niche role? 

Niche roles are jobs that require specific skill sets and are referred to differently from company to company. This is why niche roles are best defined by their SKILLS rather than by job title.

How can Emsi Burning Glass help?

Utilizing our Job Title Library and/or our robust Skills Library, we can craft a customized search guiding you to the best fit talent for: 

1. Filling roles quickly
2. Understanding the competitive landscape relevant to your niche role
3. Having data-driven convos with hiring managers around supply and compensation

Emsi Burning Glass Definitions 

1. Skills
   • Skills act as our guide to the RIGHT talent. Skills tell us what people can do and what employers are looking for. Skills detail the type of worker relevant to your niche role.
   • Scraped from hundreds of millions of job postings, resumes, and online profiles— our library of over 30,000 skills is updated every two weeks, reflecting real-time market changes.
2. Job Titles
   • Job titles are the entry point into many reports. Because Emsi Burning Glass has already done the work of identifying corresponding data sets to job titles, you can start with what you know. 
   • We scrape job titles directly from job postings, profiles, and resumes. We then deduplicate, clean, and add the titles to our normalized library (of over 75,000 titles). Emsi Burning Glass job titles are mapped to their corresponding government, profile, and skills data sets.
3. Keywords 
   • Keywords are matched against the original text of job postings and profiles. They allow you to filter based on intricate (or simple) combinations of words and phrases (i.e. Boolean strings). 
4. Profile Data
   • Profile data measures the supply of talent in a region and shows what makes a job or an individual unique (based on their skills, job history, education history, etc.). 
   • Profile data allows you to search for skill-specific information. 
5. SOC Codes
   • Standard Occupational Classification codes are the system that the government has created for organizing statistical labor market data. 
   • SOCs provide context needed for labor market research, but do not provide skill-specific information. 

GOAL ONE: Find the Right Fit. What job titles, skills, and SOC codes represent your niche role?

Reports to use: Profile Analytics (to fill roles quickly), Job Posting Competition (to understand competitive landscape)

*The following steps work for both reports 

STEP ONE: Always start with what you know! 

→ Take your job title and run it through our taxonomy of over 75,000 titles to see if you have a fit. 

→ If you don’t have a direct fit, decide what skills are MOST RELEVANT to the position. Warning! Don’t pick too many skills, or you will box yourself out of relevant talent.

STEP TWO: Refine your search 

→ Within Profile Analytics and Job Posting Competition, the left-hand control panel has many filters that  help refine or expand your search as needed. Take a few more seconds to add/exclude other skills, play with keywords, or narrow by competitor insights.

Examples: 

→ Using your group of skills, discover relevant, nearby job titles. Emsi Burning Glass tip: Add a SOC code to your filter to guide the data closer to your niche role.

→ Add in a known competitor plus your skill group and/or a relevant SOC code to see how other employers classify their talent. 

GOAL TWO: Tell the Story. How hard will your niche role be to fill and how much should you pay to be competitive?

Reports to use: Occupation Snapshot, Profile Analytics, Compensation Analysis 

OPTION ONE: OCCUPATION SNAPSHOT

→ Start either with the best job titles you found from your previous search or the best occupations and skills and plug them into Occupation Snapshot. 

→ Alternatively, take your job description for your niche role and run it through the Job Parser to find a Suggested Job Title. 

→ Bring this to your hiring manager conversations to show:

• The available pool of skill-specific talent
• How that compares to the broader non-skill specific gov’t supply
• What the competitive wage bracket looks like
• How hot the demand is

OPTION TWO: PROFILE ANALYTICS

→ Run a search with JUST the relevant skills across the entire nation and/or your region of choice. Emsi Burning Glass tip: Run it for both to show how your region sample compares to the entire nation.

→ Refine your search with any of the useful parameters found earlier in your discovery. 

→ Show your hiring managers the supply of skill-specific talent in detail.

OPTION THREE: COMPENSATION ANALYSIS 

→ Start with the most relevant SOC code you found from the earlier searches. 

→ Add in a few relevant skills to see how the compensation shifts. 

→ Discover what the competitive wage is within the external labor market. 

• • Oftentimes the 75th and 90th percentile represent higher skilled, more years of experience talent (i.e. the competitive wage bracket).

 

Download the PDF version of this training: Navigating Niche Roles