LinkUp Data Insights: Information Sector Hiring

The Information sector contains some of the hottest businesses right now such as Facebook, Twitter, Disney, and the newly formed government contractor, Perspecta, Inc. Therefore, we thought we would analyze job openings in this hot industry for this month’s Monthly Sector Spotlight. The Information sector consists of six sub-sectors with Telecommunications, Publishing, and Broadcasting accounting for 80% of all job openings.

An individual company’s share of job openings varies within each sub-sector. In the Internet & Other Information Services sub-sector, Facebook accounts for 45% of all job openings while Twitter only accounts for 9% of job openings in the same sub-sector. In the Publishing sub-sector, there is a lot more competition for job openings so Microsoft only accounts for 13% of job openings and the second highest company, Oracle accounts for 12% of job openings.

Here at LinkUp, we frequently analyze sub-sectors by comparing short-term job openings (“Momentum”) to long-term trends (“Growth”). In the Information industry, job openings in the Broadcasting sub-sector had been in long-term decline until a jump in job openings at Comcast over the summer drove short-term momentum up 11%. The opposite is true in the Publishing sub-sector. Microsoft and Oracle had strong year-over-year increases in job openings but have steadily reduced their number of job openings through the 2018 summer months. Finally, all three of the smaller sub-sectors: Data Processing, Hosting, & Related Services, Internet & Other Info Services, and Motion Picture & Sound Recording Industries have increased job openings in both the long-term and short-term.

Further exploring the job market data, we found that job duration, a metric that indicates how quickly jobs are filled, has remained stable year-over-year for the total Information sector. On average, companies in the Information sector filled job openings in 48 days. Job duration does verily widely though by sub-sector. The Data Processing, Hosting, & Related Services sub-sector filled jobs in August within 38 days, which is 9 days faster than August 2017. The Internet and Other Information Services sub-sector takes the longest to fill job openings at 63 days and that is 11 days longer than it took firms in this sub-sector to fill job openings in August 2017.

While Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other Information sector companies continue to grab headlines in the rest of 2018 and beyond, we will continue to monitor job openings and report out any new findings we uncover.