What’s Hidden in Your Competitors’ Talent Data?

Transcript

John: Alright — I think we’re live.
Looks like people are joining. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening —wherever you’re joining from, it’s great to see you here. I can already seesome familiar faces in the chat, so thank you for joining.

As people roll in, I’ll get straight into today’s topic.We’re talking about competitive strategy — specifically how organizations canuse hidden signals in the labor market to inform real business decisions.

Before we begin, we’ll do a quick run-through of the webinarexperience so you can navigate the Goldcast page in front of you.

This is the main window — this is where you’ll see today’spresentation in the big screen. If at any time you want to see what we’representing in more detail, click the icon in the bottom-right corner to expandit.

On the right-hand side is where we’ll do most of ourengagement. You’ll see Chat, Documents, and Q&A. Under Docs, you’llfind today’s presentation and additional resources, including an on-demandsession — we’ll get to that later.

We’ll try to answer questions as we go, but we’ll alsoreserve time at the end for discussion and any questions you might have. Therewill also be a poll near the end, so keep an eye out for that.

And for those seeking HRCI credit, we’ll share the programcode at the end of the presentation and highlight it again in the close.

We’ll be together for about 45 minutes to an hour. It shouldbe a smooth flight — because we have the best pilot in the business, and thatis Matt McGuire.

Matt: Thank you, John.

John: You’re welcome. How are you doing?

Matt: I’m good — I’m excited to get into this topic.We’ve probably done three or four of these over the past nine to twelve months.Competitive intelligence is such a huge topic, and I’m really glad to keepdigging into it, share TalentNeuron’s knowledge, and get feedback from thegroup as well.

John: Absolutely. Thanks for making time — and thankyou to our audience joining as we speak. We’ve got a lot to cover in the next45 minutes.

I’m John — I’ll be your co-pilot — but it’s reallyMatt who will be leading us today.

Matt: Thanks, John. I always like to start theseconversations with a little table-setting around how we view talent managementand the transformation process that all of you are involved in every day.

It comes down to three core areas. The first — and we’regoing to focus a lot on it today — is understanding the talent landscape. Thatincludes what’s happening outside your organization: competitors, and themarket at large. It also includes what’s happening inside: your skills, thetasks your teams are doing, and how automation is affecting work inside theorganization.

From there, we move into planning: What are the current andfuture skill requirements you’re going to need? Where are the gaps in yourworkforce relative to where you need to be in three years, five years, tenyears? What scenarios could affect your business — from anywhere? This is aboutcreating a proactive workforce strategy.

And the final piece is transformation — the action tied tothe plan. When we need to fill gaps down the road, how are we going to do it?Do we recruit external talent? Do we build and reskill internally? Do we usecontingent talent? Where can automation enable redesign — freeing capacity todrive new capabilities?

These steps form a loop: as you transform, you need to goback and re-check the labor market — where is supply available today if youneed to buy or borrow talent? So keep in mind: where are you spending most ofyour time — understanding, planning, or transformation? Each matters forsuccess.

With that set, let’s talk about the “understand” side.

John: The reason we keep bringing up our workforcetransformation framework — and starting with competitive intelligence — is thestate of the world around us. We need an always-on framework to deal withextraordinary volatility and change in the labor market.

Over the last six years, the story largely tells itself:COVID-19 disruption; global supply chain shifts; manufacturing strategiesmoving away from China; hiring surges (which now feels like a long time ago);geopolitical instability; rapid economic adjustments; and the launch ofgenerative AI. All of it has reshaped how organizations think about work.

Through all of this, the labor market reacts. When we lookat job postings across the S&P 100 over that same period, volatility isobvious — and it’s something we have to deal with every day.

So the question isn’t whether hiring and demand changes —it’s what insight we can extract from those movements, and how organizationscan translate that into a competitive advantage.

Matt: When you think about these fluctuations: howmuch do you know about what’s causing them? There’s so much labor market dataavailable — hiring trends, compensation trends, demand by location. Thosetrends look different depending on where you’re looking. Some economies are onthe way up; others are on the way down. Company focus in those areas dependsheavily on supply.

Skills data matters too: Which skills are rising in demand?Which are waning? And importantly for this conversation — what’s happening inthe market at large, and where are your competitors investing?

What do you know about your employer brand? What do you knowabout your competitors’ employer brand — reputationally and in employeesentiment?

And then overall supply and demand: Are candidates availablewhere you want to be? How is your talent distributed geographically? How areyour competitors’ talent pools distributed?

The way TalentNeuron looks at this data is by bringing allof it together. (John, if you can move to the next slide.) We pull in billionsof candidate profiles globally. We cover 142 countries and unique markets —representing 96% of global GDP. We track 65,000 skills and how they evolve. Werun roughly 50 million AI-based computations daily to model the data and put itin context. We also have 25 years of historical data in many regions, millionsof job posts, and millions of salary data points.

So where does this start to play into competitive framing?That’s where we want to focus.

John: Because the intelligence we provide is reallyin response to the long and intimidating to-do list that HR and businessleaders face: spotting emerging skills, identifying capability gaps,anticipating shifts in supply, predicting disruption, and protecting scarcetalent. These are ongoing challenges — and increasingly, they are competitivechallenges.

Before we go further, let’s launch a quick poll tounderstand ownership of competitive intelligence within your organization. Isit HR, a strategy office, another function?

On the right side of your screen, click the Poll taband make a selection. As responses come in, we’ll review them.

(Reviewing results) By and large, it looks like CorporateStrategy and/or a designated Competitive Intelligence function arethe most popular responses. SWP owns some of this. Talent Acquisition or PeopleAnalytics less so. We also see it shared across multiple functions — which iscommon among many customers and prospects.

Interesting to see Corporate Strategy and CompetitiveIntelligence paired closely.

John: The reason we ask is because this perspectivehas helped us evolve our offering — our understanding of what competitiveworkforce data enables changes every year, and TalentNeuron changes with it.

Traditionally, organizations used labor market intelligencefor the core use cases: building future-ready workforces, supporting strategicworkforce planning, understanding talent competitors, and improving strategicsourcing. Those remain important.

But increasingly, customers are moving beyond thosetraditional use cases. Competitive workforce data is now informing corebusiness strategy: evaluating M&A targets, anticipating capacity expansion,preventing talent poaching, and detecting strategic pivots among competitorsearly.

Labor market data is becoming a critical signal forbusiness-level strategy.

Let me illustrate with a couple of examples.

First: we analyzed hiring activity at Cisco. This viewcovers June 2022 through August 2024 — so it’s a bit dated, but it’s a clearexample. At a headline level, the story looked straightforward: hiring slowedin mid-2022; layoffs followed later; hiring recovered and declined again; andit looked like cost reduction was the priority.

But the most valuable insight sits a level below theheadlines. When we looked at hiring by function, a more nuanced story emerged:some functions stayed flat, some declined sharply, and others were relativelyunaffected. That suggests this wasn’t simply broad cost reduction — somethingelse was happening in the mix.

We then went deeper into skills data in those job postings.What we found: demand for AI skills was driving much of the change. Cisco’s ITorganization increased demand for specific AI skills by more than 200% duringthe period. So while overall hiring declined, the organization was reallocatinginvestment toward AI and automation — an innovation story.

Within TalentNeuron’s platform, you could see the strategicshift before it became obvious externally — and far beyond what you could pickup from headlines.

Second: sometimes insight doesn’t come from thousands of jobpostings — it can come from one or two if you’re paying attention. We saw asingle job posting in South Korea (forgive my pronunciation). On its own, itcould look like an anomaly. But analyzing the posting showed signals aroundbioprocessing, cell culture, safety management, innovation, and large-scalelife sciences operations.

That role signaled early planning for a bioproductionfacility in that geography. You could piece the story together well in advance— months to a year before a public announcement that Merck would be opening abioprocessing plant.

These signals are valuable because they let you understandwhere expansion is occurring, what capabilities are being built, and whatcompetitive risk is emerging — months or years ahead of public knowledge. Farahead of headlines and alerts.

That lead time helps you make critical talent and planningdecisions — which Matt will detail next.

Matt: With those examples in mind — Cisco and Merck —you can see signals hidden in skills data, function growth and decline, andgeographic and location signals before announcements are made.

So what’s the “net-net”? Once we have the “understand” step,we have to think about planning and transformation.

Those signals drive planning in a few ways. First:retention. As you see competitors making moves, can you get ahead to protectand retain your current talent because you know a threat is coming?

Second: scenario planning. Can you plan for new marketentrants going after your talent or similar skill sets?

Third: strategic workforce planning more broadly — yourpeople strategies, where you will find supply if your current talent pools areat risk.

There’s also supply chain implications. If a competitor isentering a location where you’re established, can you get ahead ofrelationships with supply chain partners?

Your location strategy has to account for the fact thatcompetitors can move in at any time and put your supply and talent at risk.

Then comes action. First: proactive talent acquisition —getting ahead as competitors move in. For example, if you see a competitorpreparing for a downturn, you may be able to take advantage of talentavailability.

Second: tracking competitor skills and technologies — doesit give you insight into products they may bring to market in the future?

Third: responding to layoffs — how do you adjust talentacquisition accordingly?

Fourth: retaining critical skills by watching strategichiring by competitors.

And finally: using those strategic shifts not just asthreats, but to sharpen your differentiation — because you know what skills,technologies, and profiles competitors are hiring.

There are a couple ways TalentNeuron can help. We havecompetitive intelligence solutions including Competitor Analysis —looking at competitors by role and location, hiring intensity, non-traditionaltalent competitors — and a new offering coming next week, Competitor Insight,which provides a deeper workforce profile of competitors: where they’relocated, where they’re hiring, where threats are emerging, functions, roles,talent movement, and where they’re gaining and losing talent.

This suite helps fill in the gaps we’ve discussed.

To bring it together: labor market signals help identifyfunction growth, emerging capabilities, threats and risk to talent pools, andcontraction or expansion in adjacent markets. This becomes more than talent: itcan support planning for new products and identifying M&A targets — allhidden in competitive data.

John: We’ll close there and share a few resources.

A great place to start is an on-demand webinar in the Docssection. You can watch it right now if you’d like. Our customer LisaBrinkman Rose from Roche joined us a few months ago to talk about how Rocheuses competitive insight as a strategic signal — everything from identifyingM&A targets to finding geographies for high-value talent. It’s a worthwhile30 minutes.

Matt: I want to call that out too — that conversationwith Lisa was incredible. There are great tips whether you’re running this kindof insight solo or building a dedicated team.

John: Absolutely — including internal talk tracks forshifting perception of competitive intelligence from a talent acquisition toolto a strategic data source. Highly recommended.

We have a few minutes for questions — drop them into thechat. I’d also love to hear why you’re particularly interested in competitiveintelligence in 2026 and what value you see from this type of insight.

Also, if you’d like to speak with Matt or our team aboutyour strategic goals, you can request a call using the button at the top ofyour screen. That’s a good way for us to understand what you’re trying to doand how we can help.

For current customers: we have a webinar on March 26— please save the date. It will be a customer-only session on the productroadmap with Matt and Christian Resch. We’ll spotlight expandedcompetitive intelligence capabilities and more — you won’t want to miss it.

Matt: We have a lot coming next month: the newCompetitor Insight, a natural-language LMI assistant, organizational design,and job architecture solutions that can build job architectures in minutes.Please sign up — we’ll share the roadmap and what’s coming.

John: Awesome. We’ll make sure customers get aninvitation via email. For everyone else, keep an eye out for post-eventfollow-up.

(Sandia asks) Will we receive a recording? Yes — the webinarrecording will be sent in follow-up, and the slides are in the Docs section.

If there are no further questions, we’ll follow up after theevent with the recording and additional information.

Before we wrap, here is your HRCI program number — this iswhat you submit to HRCI to receive your educational credit. You can also findit in the attached PowerPoint.

Matt — anything else before we close?

Matt: No — I appreciate everyone joining. I hopeyou’ll check out the webinar with Lisa and dive in. We’re here for you if youneed us.

John: Fantastic. If there are no additionalquestions, we’ll follow up after the event. Great to see you — and lookingforward to next time. Thanks for making time, and enjoy the rest of your day.

John & Matt: Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.

(After close / lingering Q&A)

John: Hey Bridget — thanks for the question. If yourequest a call, we’ll follow up with you directly. Job architecture and workarchitecture — we’ll connect one-to-one because we have more coming there inthe near future.

John: Matt, we’ll detail more at the end of March —is that right?

Matt: Yeah — we’re heavily invested in that thisyear. We already have an industry-leading solution, and we’re tripling down —quadrupling down — on it this year. Lots of fun stuff we can talk about.

John: Awesome — thank you. If anyone else hasquestions, drop them in the chat.

Matt: John, I didn’t leave the stage — I bailed andthen came back.

John: Alright — I think we’re set. Thanks again forthe additional question, Bridget — we’ll get back to you. Thanks everybody.Bye-bye.

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