The acquisition of Rhetorik has significantly strengthened Lightcast’s professional profiles, now featuring one of the world’s largest GDPR, CCPA, and DPA-compliant datasets. Contacts contain up to 26 parameters, such as details for outreach, location, employment information, and more. This enhanced offering pairs rich, verified professional data with actionable intelligence and over a quarter billion companies—including technographics, financials, and more.

With this data expansion, you now have access to a globally-focused solution that provides key contact information through flexible delivery options, including a SaaS platform and APIs or Snowflake, enabling flexible and scalable integration into your existing systems.

We’re thrilled to introduce the Hiring Difficulty Score (beta), a highly-requested insight available via our Geography Explorer (US) and Global Dashboard (global) reports. This powerful metric answers a critical question: “Where is it easier or harder to hire for this role?” No more juggling supply, demand, and compensation data—our score (0 = easiest, 5 = most difficult) combines these factors into a single, sortable column that helps you quickly compare regions and identify where talent is relatively abundant, less sought after, and more affordable. It’s ready to use right now, with no extra steps required, helping you rank markets and make faster, smarter hiring decisions. Curious about the details? For current clients, dive into our knowledge base article on the methodology via the link below (login required).

We are excited to announce a significant feature update in Alumni Pathways: improved Alumni Wage Estimates. This enhancement provides your institution with more accurate, defensible, and actionable data, empowering you to better showcase the true value of your program.

What's New?

We've completely overhauled how alumni wage estimates are calculated and presented within Alumni Pathways. Our team has adopted a robust new model, drawing on strong foundations like OEWS (Occupational Employment Wage Statistics) data. This update significantly improves the granularity of our insights, directly addressing the ongoing challenge of ensuring wage estimates remain as close to true wages as possible for accurate insights. This allows you to estimate the median wage for your alumni with greater precision.

In addition, due to valuable client feedback, we're also thrilled to introduce 25th and 75th percentile ranges to all relevant reports, including GoRecruit. This provides a much clearer picture than a single point estimate, illustrating the estimated range of what your alumni could be earning based on their occupations, location, and years of experience.

Why This Matters to You:

This powerful update directly impacts your ability to demonstrate the strong return on investment (ROI) of your programs with more reliable wage figures. These improved estimates will empower your researchers, marketers, and institutional leaders to:

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  Strengthen Marketing & Recruitment Efforts: Confidently use more accurate wage data to highlight the earning potential of your graduates, attracting prospective students and showcasing the value of your education.
  

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  Inform Program Decisions: Gain deeper insights into alumni career paths and earning trends, allowing you to make more data-driven decisions about program development and curriculum.
  

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  Present your data with confidence: Our new model provides a more robust and defensible methodology, ensuring that the wage estimates you present are credible and trustworthy, addressing previous concerns about defensibility.
  

Key Benefits at a Glance:

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  Ranges, Not Just Averages: You'll now see estimated wage ranges (25th-75th percentile) for a more complete picture.
  

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  Up-to-Date Data: Our new model utilizes current data to ensure accuracy.
  

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  Enhanced Granularity: The new model is designed for individual wage estimation with better specificity for geography and SOC, addressing previous limitations.
  

Our brand-new API portal is now live! There you will find upgraded documentation that is interactive, better organized, and packed with more detailed information than ever before. Designed with developers in mind, the new format makes it easier to explore, understand, and implement the data you need. Check it out via the link below.

As the leader in labor market data, we take our commitment to neutrality and accuracy seriously. On December 5, 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the 2024 Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data, but Colorado’s industry and substate detail was missing due to the ongoing modernization of the state’s unemployment insurance system. This lapse, in turn, caused Colorado data to also be absent from the latest Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) report.

Because Lightcast has decades of experience collecting and refining official statistics including OEWS and QCEW, we were able to deploy a proxy solution that filled the gap in the official statistics. Even when outside sources experience disruptions or format changes, Lightcast has complete and comprehensive data—so that our customers do, too.

For employment, we advanced 2023 OEWS data for Colorado and aligned it with 2024 QCEW trends. We projected 2023 figures forward for earnings using national wage changes for observed national level changes at the two-digit SOC between 2023-2024. These enhanced data runs and refined estimation methods mean you can count on Lightcast data to be dependable and always available—even when official sources fall short. For current clients, more detailed information is available via the link below (login required).