Why smarter, faster, and more future-ready workforce decisions start with external context
In 2025, workforce decisions can no longer live in silos. As talent acquisition, workforce planning, people analytics, and organizational design begin to converge, organizations must adopt a shared foundation of insight. That foundation starts with talent intelligence—the intersection of internal and external data—offering a unified view of the workforce and labor market to support smarter, faster, and more impactful decision-making across the HR lifecycle.
So, why is external context critical for all of HR?
HR functions that operate in silos struggle to adapt to the rapid changes shaping the workforce: jobs are transforming, skills are more dynamic, and organizations must keep pace through a comprehensive understanding of their workforce and the broader labor market. The market is often moving faster than organizations are, and relying on internal data alone can’t respond to this change, especially considering:
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Over the past three years, the average job has seen 32% of its skills change, while one in four jobs has seen 75% of its skills change.
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Before the end of the decade, the US will face a shortfall of roughly 6 million workers with a labor force participation rate that continues to decline.
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51% of job postings requiring AI skills are outside IT and computer science, with explosive 800% growth in generative AI roles across non-tech industries since 2022.
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42% of CEOs said their company will remain viable for less than ten years if it continues on its current path, while almost 40% say their companies started to compete in new sectors in the last five years.
Without external data on jobs, skills, profiles, companies, and markets, organizations are only getting half the story and missing the opportunity to unite strategies across not only HR, but also across the value HR delivers to operations, finance, and innovation. Talent intelligence is the vehicle to remain agile in a continuously disruptive landscape and provides the insights that answer questions like:
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How do our internal talent pipelines compare to the external market by skill, DEI benchmarks, and/or job history—and can we compare this across our markets?
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How are our competitors’ organizations structured, how big are they, what are their hiring trends and leadership structure, what technology do they use, and how do we plan against shifts in their capabilities?
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How does our skill composition compare to our peer set and what do we need to do to recalibrate our capabilities?
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How do we ultimately discover hidden or adjacent talent pools with the right skills and hire them more cost effectively?
As Josh Bersin says, “Talent intelligence brings together all relevant internal and external data into a useful tool that empowers planning and business growth.” As AI pushes organizations into faster decision cycles, HR is uniquely positioned to provide insights that are transformative to business strategy—and those insights start with talent intelligence.
A Truly Holistic View of the Labor Market
Lightcast data layered together offers the most detailed information on skills, jobs, and supply and demand throughout the labor market. Organizations rely on finding the right people, in the right markets, with the right skills to get the job done. So, what talent intelligence data can be used to make this happen?
Skills are the basic unit and shared language of the labor market. Does your workforce have the necessary skills to operate in today’s business environment? If not, can your current skill sets support building the ones you need? If it’s required that you look externally to the market, how much will acquiring those skills cost? Should you consider temporary hiring to support a specific business initiative? What technologies can augment your workforce, and what skills will talent need to activate them?
“Build, buy, borrow, bot” questions like these can be answered when organizations merge their internal skills data with the external skills insights talent intelligence provides.
Lightcast collects raw data on over one billion current and historical postings, synthesizing and interpreting our findings to provide actionable competitive intelligence.
Job posting analytics can identify global supply and demand for workers, skills, and jobs, as well as important contextual details like location or compensation trends. For example, job postings signal emerging skills and how they’re changing over time. Are your competitors requiring different skills now than they have before, and are you keeping up? If other companies are increasingly emphasizing certain skills, like AI, it could indicate a shift in their strategy or a response to changing market conditions that should be accounted for.
Real-time profile data adds another layer of depth to talent intelligence by providing valuable insights into the skills, experience, and location of potential candidates. What skills does the current labor pool possess? What companies are they working for or have they worked for in the past? Where and how can you reach them with competitive job postings? Are you able to contact specific or passive candidates? Can you segment by DEI attributes?
In addition to thinking about the external labor market, profile data also gives insight into your internal talent. When employees share their work experience and skills online, organizations can leverage this information to identify high-potential employees in their company, opportunities for reskilling and upskilling, and areas in their workforce with skills gaps. Lightcast collects over 850 million profiles, normalized in 46 languages, and enriched with skills, role history, DEI tags, and verified contacts.
Company data provides critical context about employers that shape the labor market, offering insight into how organizations are structured, what technologies they use, where they’re hiring, and how their workforce is evolving. This includes firmographics (size, industry, revenue, location), org structures (departments, functions, leadership layers), tech stacks (systems in use), workforce composition (roles, skill makeup, diversity benchmarks), and hiring patterns (volume, timing, regions).
By layering in company data with skills, profiles, and job postings, organizations can benchmark against peers, identify emerging competitors, and build talent strategies with precision. Are similar companies hiring in new regions? Are they growing specific functions, changing leadership structures, or adopting new tech? These insights help HR teams align workforce decisions with broader business strategy, whether it’s sourcing niche talent, planning a market expansion, or conducting M&A workforce due diligence.
Governments worldwide publish data on compensation, industries, occupations, education, and demographics. While not as updated or specific as Lightcast data, this information serves as a key component to broadly understand the global labor market. Enriched with our proprietary methodology, LMI adds contextual detail for insights that are standardized for clear comparisons all over the world.
The proprietary Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy (LOT) covers nearly 2,000 occupations, over 75,000 job titles, and more than 32,000 skills. This comprehensive and updated taxonomy not only provides organizations a standardized and trusted framework for classifying jobs and skills, but also enables meaningful comparisons. Whether you’re considering job roles across occupations, across different industries, or even across nations, LOT allows you to make apples-to-apples comparisons.
How does Lightcast differentiate when it comes to skills?
Our rich skills taxonomy is curated through years of consulting work and engagement with emerging trends, uncovering in-demand skills in the labor market. Our dedicated skills taxonomy team vets each and every skill, ones not only brought to them by our in-house applied research team, but also skills introduced through customer feedback.
As skills change in the labor market, your skills taxonomy needs to follow suit. Lightcast open skills taxonomy updates every two weeks to ensure we provide the most up-to-date and complete picture of skills available. New skills are tracked for their historical demand and supply, providing even more context to inform talent decisions.
With labor forces becoming increasingly global, you need access to skills data in multiple languages. Our skills taxonomy is currently available in 14 languages, with additional support on the horizon.
Unlike a “flat” skills library, our taxonomy consists of three levels: Categories, Subcategories, and Skills. This comprehensive and organized approach gives order and additional meaning to skills, ensuring that you can easily navigate and pinpoint the specific skills you need.
Leveraging Talent Intelligence to Connect People, Planning, and Performance
Incorporating talent intelligence into business strategy is more important now than ever before. As workforce demands shift, skills evolve, and AI accelerates change, HR leaders must collaborate across functions to deliver insights that drive growth, efficiency, and adaptability. When Talent Acquisition, Workforce Planning, People Analytics, and Organizational Design work from a shared foundation of labor market data, they unlock new abilities for HR to lead alongside Finance, Operations, and Strategy.
Understanding how your internal talent compares to what’s available in the external labor market is critical for building a future-ready workforce. Skills—not titles—are now the currency of workforce planning, and organizations who track in-demand and emerging skills are able to predict future skills gaps and make plans to fill them. What skills are required to keep up with the rapid change happening across industries? Competitors? Market expansion efforts? Talent intelligence allows you to identify these skills, anticipate their hiring trends, and stay ahead of the competition when building internal talent pipelines, or recruiting for them. Using profile-level labor market data, hiring trends, and historical transitions, HR teams can compare internal readiness against the competition with skills as the common denominator, and identify where to double-down on development, sourcing, or retention. This benchmarking isn’t just about identifying risk; it also informs investment. It helps People Analytics and Talent Management leaders prioritize upskilling programs, shift internal mobility strategies, and ensure workforce planning is grounded in real-world market signals. When internal decisions are validated against external context, HR becomes a stronger partner to Finance and Strategy in building cost-effective capacity and future capability models.
Talent intelligence enables visibility into what other companies are doing to attract and hire top talent. What markets should you be targeting? What job title should you be using? How much do you need to pay to fill this role? Tracking competitors’ job titles, in-demand skills, sourcing strategy, and compensation supports an adaptable hiring strategy that keeps pace with the changing dynamics of the labor market. Lightcast’s company-level data, enriched with job posting analytics, technographic segmentation, and verified org structure insights, gives HR a clear view into how competitors are evolving their talent strategies and where they’re making strategic moves. This intelligence is especially valuable to Workforce Planning and Strategic HR teams when aligning talent strategy with growth or transformational goals. Whether assessing entry into a new market or anticipating a shift in competitive capabilities, these insights allow proactive adjustments to workforce investments, external risk response, and cross-functional long-range planning.
As technology evolves and business models shift, yesterday’s workforce data architecture simply won’t support tomorrow’s priorities. HR teams need the ability to continuously assess whether their current workforce possesses the right skills, and whether those skills align with how peer organizations are evolving. Talent intelligence gives organizations this clarity by analyzing internal skill composition in context with external skill trends, job transitions, and competitor benchmarks. With an open and dynamic skills taxonomy, organizations can remain in sync with the labor market and leverage skills in every part of the business. A common skills language shapes critical aspects of the business, like job architecture and skill profiles, empowering a clearer understanding of emerging capability models. This enables Organizational Design, L&D, and Strategy teams to collaborate on transformation initiatives, ensure reskilling efforts are market-relevant, and make the case for internal investment before capability gaps become business risks. When recalibration is proactive, HR helps shape the future and prevents costly reactivity.
In a tight labor market, the ability to uncover talent that others overlook is exceptionally valuable. Traditional sourcing approaches often fail to surface candidates with non-linear career paths or adjacent skill sets. Talent intelligence allows HR teams to broaden their view by using inferred skills, job transitions, and contact-level data to identify qualified candidates in unexpected places. As demographics continue to rapidly shift and younger workforces have increasingly less traditional backgrounds, granularity in sourcing is crucial to reducing cost-per-hire, time-to-hire, and quality of hire. Enriched global profile data—including verified contact information, job histories, and skill profiles—propel Talent Acquisition teams to move far beyond keyword matching, toward actively targeting niche or emerging talent pools. This capability is especially powerful when entering new markets, hiring for in-demand roles, or reducing reliance on costly third-party sourcing. By combining strategic insight with actionable outreach, HR can move faster, reduce hiring costs, and build pipelines that drive growth, innovation, and DEI goals.
Talent intelligence isn’t just about collecting data; it's about harnessing the power of data to drive strategic workforce decisions. By merging internal and external data sources, organizations can navigate the complexities of the labor market with confidence.
