Thesis Check: How Hiring Trends Reflect S&P Reshuffle

One of the really remarkable features of LinkUp Compass is how seamlessly it facilitates the age-old thesis check. Imagine scrolling Bloomberg with your morning coffee. Between Elon Musk headlines, you notice an article of actual potential value to your portfolio, industry, or corporation. Say it’s this article in particular, a report on last week’s decision by the S&P Dow Jones Indices to add KKR, CrowdStrike, and GoDaddy to the S&P 500 as part of its latest quarterly weighting change. For those who understand the forward-looking value of job openings to future company growth, pointed questions emerge: “How has hiring trended at these companies in the last year? Were there signs of the growth and gravitas recognized last week by the S&P in the months leading up to the reshuffle?”

We took these questions to Compass to check our thesis that the inclusion of companies representing major economic growth—KKR as a leader of the booming private investment business and GoDaddy & CrowdStrike as software companies netting major interest from Cloud Computing and AI—would be indicated by a runup of increased job openings at the firms.

And in fact, we found exactly that. In the Compass Daily Active Listings Index above, you’ll notice a clear trend of growth in job openings in the three companies joining the S&P later this month. Active listings are up YoY at KKR by 158%, CrowdStrike by 90%, and GoDaddy by 63%. Meanwhile, the three companies getting ousted have either experienced a decline in openings (-32% for Robert Half inc.), or growth at a lower rate than the S&P ascendants (+25% for Comerica & +40% for Illumina).

It’s a simple but powerful representation of how job openings data correlates with company health over time. Growth trends in job openings give an advance picture of companies’ priorities as industries and their corporate vanguards extend or contract in economic weight class. And with LinkUp jobs data, updated daily and directly from employer websites across the globe, you can see patterns of growth or decline with a head start on traditional market data.

Keep ahead of the company curve and identify companies positioned for growth with LinkUp Compass: it’s the job market, now in living color. And stay tuned for more of our Notes from The Evidence Lab, where we showcase the engaging interface and unmatched granularity of our job market dataset.

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