How Competitive Intel Product Teams Use Human Resource & Employment Services Data

The workhorse is the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) filtered to Employment Services (NAICS 5613) - the industry code covering employment placement agencies, temporary help services and professional employer organizations. It publishes quarterly establishments, employment and wages at county, metropolitan area, state and national level; the Q1 2025 NAICS 5613 slice alone holds 3,623 rows, archive files reach back to 1990, and everything is commercial delivery terms CSV. A CI product can chart a staffing rival's home-county headcount trajectory quarter by quarter without touching a proprietary feed.

Two caveats matter when you operationalize it. Some cell values are suppressed for confidentiality and flagged with disclosure codes, so totals cannot always be re-derived, and automated retrieval must follow BLS usage policy with an identifying User-Agent. For adjacent coverage, the slice also indexes U.S. Census County Business Patterns establishment counts and LEHD Quarterly Workforce Indicators for NAICS 56, which round out the same footprint picture from different federal programs.

Footprint data also doubles as market-sizing input. Because QCEW splits NAICS 5613 by county and ownership sector, you can estimate how much of a metro's staffing employment a rival controls before you estimate how much is contestable - which is the number sales leadership actually asks for.

Yes, and they are the closest thing this industry has to real-time competitor telemetry. The BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) runs monthly job openings, hires and separations series from December 2000 to the latest reference month - about 2,061 series and roughly 376,000 rows in the current text file, covering all 50 states and DC at the total nonfarm level. That depth makes it backtestable: you can correlate a rival's reported placements against sector-wide churn before their press release lands.

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) is the definitive free benchmark: the May 2025 all-data file holds 413,528 rows and 32 columns spanning roughly 530 metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas, industries and nine wage percentiles for about 830 occupations, including HR managers, HR specialists and recruiters. Archives extend to 1997, so a CI model can price a rival's bill-rate assumptions historically rather than guessing.

Pairing the two matters for margin analysis: OEWS gives the defensible public percentile, Payscale shows whether a rival's posted pay leans on bonus and commission rather than base - a structural difference OEWS alone cannot reveal.