Knowledge Officer launches People Insights to analyse talent of top companies

In a world where quality tech skills are scarce and the demand for them is constantly increasing, decision makers need to look closely at the competition in terms of their hiring decisions. Which departments do they invest in? Where are employees coming from? And what are their skills? At Knowledge Officer we thought that by gaining insights into what talent decisions work for the most successful companies, those in charge can get an edge in their own strategy or investment choices, all backed by numbers.

We decided to dive deep into data to find out what talent mix makes the high performing companies so successful. Our team of skilful engineers worked hard for the past 6 months to analyse over 100,000,000 data points and today we are very excited to announce:

Knowledge Officer is launching a new product: People Insights! 

People Insights is a tool which equips you with in-depth talent data analytics to make better decisions. The data focuses on the organisational structure, employee skills, and their career development. We know well that today’s talent decisions need to be backed by data and we believe that the future lies in talent intelligence. With People Insights, you are empowered to make more informed talent development decisions that will place you in a strategic point within the organisation. 

“Knowledge Officer employs a data-driven approach in all its products. With People Insights, we wanted to fuel people with data that empower them to be the Knowledge Officers within their organizations and businesses”, says Ahmed Sharkasy, the Co-Founder of Knowledge Officer.

People Insights by Knowledge Officer

“People Insights are the result of our search for the DNA of successful companies. This search, informed by more 100,000,000 data points, has led us to a conclusion that the valuation of companies can be, to great extent, predicted by insights about their People. People Insights will give our clients a closer insider look into what it takes to join the league of extraordinary companies by having extraordinary people” – he adds.

The technology behind People Insights

Our scalable engines now extract 500,000 jobs per day according to our needs: by country, job title, company, you name it. We also analyse the skills of millions of LinkedIn users that we harvest from their public profiles and our ever growing user database. Our algorithms constantly mine through this massive collection of data to automatically identify and learn about new job titles.

By aggregating across job posts we can quickly understand the skills that go into each job title, the top related titles and classify the job titles into departmental groups. This is a delicate optimisation problem between balancing the needs of the market (job posts) versus the real-time current skills of the professionals (LinkedIn and our userbase).

We analyse the co-occurrence of skills and the classes of job titles to better contextualise skills into categories and types. By building contextual embeddings and analysing skill names, we can even identify synonyms and new skills. We can also understand how skills required for a job title evolve as the seniority level increases. In the future, we will be able to differentiate how skills and experience vary across different locales and industries.

What’s in it for you?

We selected some high-growth tech companies for the initial launch to showcase how they structure their workforce and where they source it from. Just select which one you want to focus on and we’ll present you with the data. 

1. Get to know how top companies are structured and which departments they mostly invest in.

We believe that you need to have the right balance in terms of departments if you want to execute effectively. This mix varies though, depending on the strategic priorities. Let’s take a look at Transferwise resources: they have a very strong capability in Software Engineering and Product Management but they seem to not invest much in marketing or sales. 

People Insights: Company Structure

2. Understand what are the strongest skills and least common skills within a company and build your L&D strategy around it.

Here you can see what are the most relevant organisational skills and how they are distributed within the company. You can also explore what is the skills gap – the missing skills as compared to the industry. In Transferwise, we can see that soft skills such as Customer Service, Management or Teamwork are very common. On the other hand, Transferwise’s employees lack expertise in Scrum, DevOps or Python, which may put them at a disadvantage.

People Insights: Skills

3. Learn how experienced the employees are and which company they came from.

The right balance of employee seniority and experience is crucial for a healthy workforce. It makes more junior team members learn from their more experienced colleagues, making the knowledge transfer much more seamless. On the other hand, juniors have the energy and innovative mindset that are also vital for success.

In Transferwise’s example, we can see that the employees are quite evenly distributed in terms of their working experience length, with the finance department having the most experienced employees. We can also see that they source their talent from Google, Morgan Stanley or Paypal – important data for recruiters and headhunters.

People Insights: Experience

4. Understand the educational background of the employees

Here you can check what education levels and fields employees have and how they are distributed within the company. You can also find out which Universities the organisation mostly sources from. Transferwise’s employees have mostly at least a bachelor degree and many of them are graduates from Estonian Universities such as Tallinna Tehnikaülikool or Tallinn University. If you want to follow Transferwise sourcing strategy then, you may want to visit those universities to advertise graduate programmes or internships.

People Insights: Education

5. Learn where the employees are located and which countries they previously worked in.

By looking at which locations the organisation has its employee hubs in, you can find out what the company’s geographical focus and how it’s aligned with their strategic priorities. Here we can see that employees are currently based in Estonia and in the UK mostly. Their previous location was mostly the UK which shows that quite a few employees migrated from the UK to Estonia. We can also see that Transferwise develops its operations in Hungary and Singapore.

People Insights: Location

Don’t stay behind and make more informed decisions with the People Insights tool 

People Insights are currently in beta stage and available free of charge for anyone interested. For starters, you can analyze workforce data of companies such as Monzo, Transferwise, or Zopa. In further stages, we will mine and analyse data from thousands of companies as well as provide more features to answer talent questions.  

We really encourage you to try out the People Insights – feel free to give us feedback on how you like the product and what other data would you find useful!

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