What can data signals from employees tell you about a company?

Julian Herzog
4 min readDec 18, 2020

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This article will show how Osterus is using data signals from employees to tell a valuable story to potential employers or investors and potentially to applicants. To demonstrate this I’ll show you an inside look at the Osterus Data Insights application. Let’s start with the first:

Part 1: How Osterus’ analysis can show you what your dream employer looks for most.

You’ve got your dream job in mind and you want to craft your CV to highlight what the firm wants. How do you go about that? Do you look at the companies ‘values’ page? Their mission statement? Short of including a few buzz-words you won’t be able to know what they want to see in you. That’s where Osterus’ knowledge base comes in.

Osterus can show what a company looks for most in its employees, where they find them, and what hidden data signals they look for. In the screenshot below you can see a comparison of data signals collected from employees of Moderna and Biontech on the Osterus clusters pointing out patterns within these companies.

What you can see here are clusters of data points extracted from CVs. Expanded above are the clusters of universities. Both Moderna and Biontech have employees from universities across the world. Moderna has three smaller clusters around the UK and US region but there’s no favourite areas. This means that as an applicant where you study won’t make a huge difference to your application.

The clusters around languages also show how diverse and international these companies are. The analysis of Moderna showed clusters around English, German and French speakers, but there was no dominating leading language also our analysis was relatively speaking superficial as we can only use the intel given from the profiles shared.

What can be inferred from this and the diversity of universities is that geographic location and origin of employees is of little importance to both Moderna and Biontech. Simply put, you don’t need to think that you’ve got to be an American from Harvard who speaks Spanish to get your foot in the door.

What is interesting in this comparison is the cluster around work experience, which is where we see these two firms diverge. Moderna has a cluster of employees who have been working at the same organisation for 5 years or more which we can’t see too strongly correlated at Biontech. What can be inferred from this is that Moderna wants to see an applicant with a substantial amount of time worked at one institution. What we don’t know is if Moderna is looking for substantial work experience or loyalty to a job…

Osterus’ knowledge data insights can show potential applicants what their firm’s current employees look like. From that applicants can model their CV, or career trajectory, to get to their dream job or firm. We try to pick up every data signal within a CV and understand its correlations, in order to help show the successfactors and in the future comprehend the matchmaking process, which ultimately will help procure talent globally.

Part 2: How Osterus’ analysis can help potential employers and investors.

The workforce of a company will show the ability of the company to execute tasks. This is an important viewpoint for investors looking to put their money behind a firm, and firms or individuals looking to hire consultants or external staff. With Osterus, you can do a competitive workforce analysis and understand all the statistics.

If you looked at the data signals from employees at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. The accounting department of Bernie Madoff would have shown a lack of experience or capability. Similarly, looking at employee data from Theranos may have shown you something amiss that let Elizabeth Holmes build a $9 billion company without a functioning product. We also enjoy analysing patterns around individual investors or advisors, do they understand the complexities and the technology? Looking at employees capabilities and data signals across the workforce maybe you could’ve seen that there were competencies missing.

Now if you’re an investor or potential employer looking at a firm you want to know; can this firm do what they say they can? If not, where are the holes in this company that need to be filled to make them successful? To answer these questions investors can look at the skills of the workforce. We are working on a knowledge index to help shed light on capabilities and know how.

If you’re looking for a consultant to come in and sort out your accounting, you want a firm filled with experienced, educated individuals in your field. You can either do this by listening to a company presentation — or sense check it with Osterus.

Note: This data from open sources like Linkedin and Xing not curated data which means some data will not be complete.

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