Job market analysis, also called labor market analysis, measures the supply of and demand for labor in a given role, industry, or region. It draws on job postings, hiring activity, pay data, and workforce composition to show where talent is scarce, where it is abundant, and what it costs employers to compete for it.
Revelio Labs builds this analysis from standardized job postings, professional profiles, salary data, and employee sentiment, so the labor market data is comparable across companies and countries.
Employers use job market analysis to plan hiring and pay, and design the overall workforce composition. Investors use the same data as an alternative input for fundamental analysis, watching hiring surges around funding rounds as an early signal that a company is scaling. Governments and public policy researchers use it to track the health of the broader economy, whether the industry in question is professional services, healthcare, finance, or trade.
The Four Components of the Labor Market
Job seekers supply labor and employers create the demand for it. Analysts look at the labor market on two levels: macro trends such as labor force participation and the unemployment rate among workers across an economy, and micro details such as pay, hours, and benefits for one role at one company.
The labor market has four primary components described below:
- Labor Force Population: Everyone available to work in a given labor market, across every industry and skill level.
- Applicant Population: Everyone actively applying for a specific type of job based on their skills and expertise. People looking for IT and graphic design jobs can fall under the same applicant population, for example.
- Applicant Pools: The applicants who apply for one specific open position. This is the first step in the recruitment process for that role.
- Candidates: The applicants who pass the organization’s screening process and are chosen for the role, often bringing transferable skills from adjacent jobs.
Job market analysis turns employment records, surveys, and labor market data into a report HR can act on. Every employer, from small businesses to multinationals, runs some version of it before making a hiring or pay decision.
Traditional sources of job market data include the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook and Current Population Survey, research groups like the Pew Research Center and the Burning Glass Institute, and job boards like LinkedIn Jobs. Each covers a piece of the picture. Revelio Labs combines job postings, professional profiles, pay, and sentiment data into one standardized view instead of stitching sources together by hand.
What Does a Job Market Analysis Involve?
Every organization runs this analysis a little differently, but most versions cover the same five steps.
Identify the Relevant Labor Market
Start by defining the labor market for each open role: the job titles, required skills, and locations you are actually competing against. This shows which roles face heavy competition for talent and which have a wide, easy-to-reach pool.
Benchmark Pay and Benefits
Compare what other employers pay for similar roles, in the same market, right now. This is what turns a compensation offer from a guess into a competitive one, and it is the fastest way to catch a role that has quietly fallen behind current market conditions.
Track Hiring and Skill Demand Trends
Job markets move. A skill that was hard to hire for a year ago can be common today, and a role that used to draw hundreds of applicants can dry up in a quarter. Tracking new postings, job descriptions, and headcount changes over time shows which employment-trend shifts are real and which are noise.
For example, a recent Revelio Labs’ analysis of 75 million tech job postings since 2024 found the average number of skills listed per posting fell about 25%, from 30 to 21, while average required experience rose from 4.6 to 4.8 years. Employers are asking for less breadth and more depth in similar jobs at the same time, using COSMOS, Revelio’s unified job postings dataset.
Set Compensation and Workforce Strategy
Job market data feeds directly into compensation structure, headcount planning, and where to open a new office or team. Each role needs its own market read. What justifies a raise for one position can be irrelevant for another, especially since a role in health care and social assistance can move at a different pace than one in trade or finance. Focus on the roles that are hardest to fill first, and in a specific industry, that list changes every year.
Align With Hiring Managers and Leadership
Job market analysis is only useful if it answers a real business question. HR should confirm staffing needs with management before running the numbers, especially if the plan calls for more positions than last year’s budget allowed: which roles are priorities, what the budget allows, and what a competitive offer means for this hire.
Why Job Market Analysis Matters
Job market analysis is not just a research exercise. It shapes four things directly, and the key takeaways apply whether you have five open roles or five hundred:
- Benchmarking: Shows how your pay, benefits, and hiring speed compare to peers in the same market. Transparent market data levels the playing field between employers who can run a full compensation study and those who can’t.
- Recruitment: Tells you which roles will be hard to fill before you post them, so you can adjust the search instead of discovering it three months in. This is the core of talent intelligence work.
- Wages and Salaries: Sets a defensible, market-tested average pay for every role instead of an internal guess.
- Strategy: Turns hiring and compensation plans into strategic decisions grounded in current job market data instead of last year’s assumptions.
How Revelio Labs Builds Job Market Data
Revelio Labs standardizes job postings, professional profiles, salary data, and employee sentiment, along with details like education level, into a single taxonomy, so a role at one company can be compared directly to the same role anywhere else.
As of August 2026, that index covers 5.6 billion job postings from 1.3 million unique sources, salary data on 33.8 million companies, and career profiles for roughly 2 billion people across 195 countries. A research team of 23 people, sixteen of them PhDs, backs the analysis with published research and custom labor market studies.
Revelio Labs also publishes Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS), a free monthly report on the labor market. RPLS’s monthly change in total employment correlates with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics at 0.77, the same as its correlation with ADP’s payroll data; BLS and ADP only correlate with each other at 0.67. RPLS’s job postings data also leads the BLS’s JOLTS survey, the government’s monthly count of job openings, by a full month. The study also determines individual, granular data points on the hiring economy, such as that it now takes 5.81 job postings to produce one external hire in the US, a ratio that has climbed for six years. See the data dictionary for the full methodology.
The same kind of granular view catches things a single headline number misses. For example, a 2025 analysis with Bloomberg found that a 10-percentage-point increase in a role’s AI exposure lined up with 11% lower hiring demand for that role at the entry level, and 7% higher demand for the same role above entry level: the same occupation moving in opposite directions depending on seniority.
Job Market Analysis FAQ
What’s the difference between job market analysis and labor market analysis?
None in practice. Job market analysis and labor market analysis describe the same activity: measuring labor supply, demand, and pay for a role, industry, or region. “Job market” is the more common everyday term; “labor market” is what economists and HR teams tend to use in formal analysis.
What data goes into a job market analysis?
A complete analysis draws on job postings (open roles and required skills), professional profiles (career history and movement), compensation data (earnings by role and location), and employee sentiment (reviews and satisfaction). Revelio Labs standardizes all four into one comparable dataset rather than leaving an analyst to reconcile them by hand.
How accurate is job market data compared to official government statistics?
Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS), Revelio Labs’ free monthly labor market report, correlates with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment change at 0.77. RPLS also publishes a full month ahead of the BLS’s JOLTS survey, so hiring-demand shifts show up before the official data catches up.
How often should a company run a job market analysis?
Compensation benchmarking is typically reviewed quarterly or annually. Hiring-demand and skill-availability tracking is more useful continuously, since a role that was easy to fill can tighten within a quarter. The right cadence depends on how fast the specific market moves, not a fixed calendar.
Running this analysis by hand means reconciling job postings, salary surveys, and HR records that were never built to match up. Tools like Revelio Terminal turn it into a live view instead of a one-time report. Start building your own view of the job market with Revelio Labs.