A new analysis of hiring trends across software and payment companies indicates likely layoffs and falls in revenue months before they occur.
The Job Market Insights by LinkUp, powered by Exabel, is a powerful platform used to analyze the job listings activity for over 7,000+ companies across sectors and geographies, which can filter for companies of interest and identify inflections and trends in various job activity metrics. A new analysis of software companies with a market cap $100bn reveals Salesforce showed a 90% decline in listings across all roles in management, sales and legal.
Commenting, Toby Dayton, CEO at LinkUp said: “Exabel’s analysis of companies in the Software and Payment Processing sectors confirms the strong correlation between job openings and a company’s performance, both positive and negative, in the future. Salesforce provides a perfect example of this correlation, as the company removed, in bulk, a statistically anomalous number of job openings, whereupon they subsequently announced a round of layoffs and issued lower revenue guidance.”
He added that investors can use the data on declining – or increasing – job listings to inform decisions about likely successes in particular companies and sectors.
Also, Neil Chapman, CEO at Exabel said: “The data driving Job Market Insights enables investors to derive unique investment insights that enhance their fundamental research process way ahead of the traditional information flow via company filings or other sector-level reports. We’re pleased to be able to power this product and bring investable insights to users with LinkUp’s powerful alternative dataset.”
Looking at monthly job listing activity over the last year, during June, July and November 2022, Salesforce deleted more jobs than it listed.
This trend was observed months before Salesforce announced a slowdown in its revenue growth in August last year. Analysis using the Job Market Insights platform by LinkUp also identified signs of an impending layoff before it surfaced publicly in November and January.
Payment companies
Analysis of job listings conducted by Exabel using LinkUp’s Job Market Insights platform identified similar trends in the payment solutions sector.
Mastercard has accelerated hiring over the last year with an 82% annual growth in active job posts. Meanwhile, Mastercard’s primary competitor, Visa, saw a 73% year-on-year drop in active job listings, American Express reduced its hiring by 69% drop, while Paypal recently announced its second layoffs on Jan 31st where it eliminated close to 7% of its workforce.