More data! Find out when your portfolio is growing with the new Hiring Activity tab (Week 84)
Let’s say you have a public job board, and you endorse your portfolio of startups… it would be neat to have an at-a-glance view that tells you
- how many jobs each has open
- whether they’re hiring more or less against recent trends
- if there’s anything new in the kind of roles.
That’s what the Hiring Activity screen shows.
- There’s data which gives a month-by-month mini graph (called a sparkline) of new jobs over the past year, also showing the maximum and average number of jobs per month, and how that compares to the last 30 days
- And if the jobs opened in the last 30 days are in, say, Dubai for the first time, or are Sales roles for the first time, or generally increasing or decreasing, well that’s called out too.
Those little sparklines? They’re made using a very clever typeface called Sparks by our friends at London data consultancy and data specialists After the flood. 📈✌️
Where is Hiring Activity found? Remember this Data button?
It appeared a few weeks ago, as the way to access the new web traffic reports.
Tap it, and you’ll find the Hiring Activity tab right there.
Let me tell you why we built this.
We’ve been crawling and sharing new job roles for well over a year now.
A few months ago, I thought I’d have a look at the data over time. So I made a little graph for each of the startups on my job board.
And I spotted this spike for ScreenCloud that I hadn’t appreciated before:
A step change in the business! Actually when I first made the graph, the spike was just the month before. Whoa. I hadn’t noticed it.
So I dropped a note to Mark, the CEO — because a hiring spike can be either good or bad news. Sure hiring can be a sign of success (or a new funding round, which isn’t always the same thing). But it can be because you’ve just lost a couple key people so you’re needed to rebuild, or because you’re having to pivot to a new model. Either way there are founder challenges.
Anyway we met for coffee. It turns out everything was going great.
Which is fantastic news. And then we were able to have a conversation about the challenges of team growth, what he should be thinking about as the CEO in this new phase, and so on.
With my investor hat on, that was a great experience: by looking at data, I’ve been able to spot something happening with a company and — hopefully — make myself useful.
All of which is to say: from that moment, I knew I wanted to bring this experience to everyone sharing jobs on Job Garden. Many of them are investors, and building that feature can help them target their time and assistance better too. So here we are: the Hiring Activity tab.
Incidentally: you should check out ScreenCloud. They’re international, HQ’d in London, and growing fast. Their tech solves a real problem in fleet-managing screens in hospitality, retail, schools, and businesses. Find ScreenCloud’s open roles on Job Garden.
