Survey Data vs. Behavioral Data

Google Flu Trends offers a fascinating look at how search engines can replace traditional models for data acquisition to great effect. When google took search requests of flu symptoms by region and mapped them to CDC data, they indicated that at much greater speed and lower cost they could collect epidemiological info the closely correlates with CDC reports. The assumption was that individuals were probably googling flu symptoms since a family member was presenting them. In an earlier post, we looked at how companies could use our job search engine to gather competitive intelligence. Likewise, at WorkHound we track how many new jobs are created daily. In an era when guessing the direction of unemployment data is darn important, we believe that our real-time tracking of new job creation could be a strong leading indicator for future unemployment numbers. Unfortunately, this data is showing that unemployment will trend negatively for the next several months. For the last 18 months we’ve been seeing about 35k new jobs being created daily and this kept the unemployment number fairly flat. New jobs created were being equally offset by jobs that were being eliminated. In the last month, this number has fallen nearly in half. We are now seeing 21.5k jobs created daily. Coupled with more job cuts, new job creation is falling well behind job elimination and will lead to higher unemployment. The good news, though, is that new jobs are being created daily and there are better tools by which to find them. Some general “new job creation” trend data that we’ve data-mined tracking directional changes over last 12 months: MORTGAGE ADVISOR: jobs decreased by 59%
COFFEE: jobs decreased by 39%
ADVERTISING: jobs decreased by 25%
PROPERTY: jobs decreased by 23% while… PILATES Instructors: increased by 57%
Marketing with Facebook Experience Jobs: increased by 24%
LEGAL: increased by 22% Granted, the increase demand for pilates instructors won’t offset job losses by estate agents, but flexibility might just be the ticket to get through this crunch period.
Billblog.workhound.co.uk