Competitive Intelligence and Classified Ads

Related to yesterday's Abercrombie wannabe post: Viewing your competitor's help wanted ads can be a good source of competitive intelligence. Here's what one firm says about analyzing classified ads:

Help-wanted ads are a source of often-overlooked information, according to Fuld: "They offer great clues about where a company is heading in its pursuit of markets and technologies. CareerPath.com http://www.careerpath.com/ and the Monster Board http://www.monsterboard.com/ are two sites that our analysts use all the time. Companies are between a rock and a hard place here. Most of them desperately need talented people, so they have to advertise their openings aggressively. But the more jobs they post, the more they expose themselves to people like us, who know how to analyze the postings. If you examine the kinds of backgrounds that a company looks for in its systems people, you can get a good sense of its technical infrastructure." Source: Gathering Competitive
Intelligence

Related Link:

Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals