You can measure most companies' workforces without access to their HR systems. Professional profiles, job postings, employee reviews, and layoff notices form a public record of who works where, who is hiring, who is leaving, and what they are paid.
Cleaned and standardized, that record answers questions a headcount line in an annual report cannot. Which teams are growing? Where do new hires come from? Is attrition rising before it shows up in results?
Revelio Labs builds this record for more than 30 million companies across 195+ countries. Below is what it measures, what it misses, and how researchers, investors, consultants, and corporate teams use it.
Where the data comes from, and what it cannot see
Workforce data is only as good as the corrections applied to it. The raw sources are public:
- Professional profiles, which record job titles, employers, locations, and work history
- Job postings from company career sites and aggregators
- Employee reviews, which carry ratings and written sentiment
- Layoff notices filed under the WARN Act
- Government statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), used for calibration
Each source has a known bias, and each needs a specific fix.
Profiles overrepresent white-collar workers. Software engineers keep their profiles current; warehouse workers often have none. Revelio reweights every count by occupation and country against BLS data in the US and ILO data elsewhere.
Profiles lag reality. People update their profiles weeks or months after they change jobs. A nowcasting model estimates the moves that have happened but are not yet visible.
People rewrite their history. Workers retroactively edit past jobs, sometimes years after leaving. Research by Bloom, Moore, Simon, and Wilkie-Rogers ("Time Travel on Professional Profiles," NBER Working Paper 35546) documents the pattern. Anyone backtesting a signal needs the data as it looked at the time.
Postings repeat. One job can appear on a dozen sites. Revelio's COSMOS deduplication matches postings by title, company, and location before anything is counted.
How close does the corrected data get? Revelio's monthly US employment estimate correlates with the BLS establishment survey at 0.77. For comparison, BLS and ADP correlate with each other at 0.67. The data does miss the largest swings: in months when BLS recorded gains of 700,000 to 800,000, mostly furloughed workers returning to old jobs, our estimates came in well below. The full one-year comparison covers where the numbers agree and where they do not, and the methodology is public.
Seven measures that describe a company's workforce
Most questions about a company's people come down to seven measures. Each is available monthly, with workforce history back to 2008.
- Headcount and growth. How many people work there, and how fast that number is changing. Break it down by role, seniority, location, or skill to see which parts of the company are expanding.
- Hiring rate. The share of the workforce that joined in a period. A falling hiring rate often shows up before a company announces a slowdown.
- Attrition rate. The share that left. Compare it with direct peers, since attrition norms differ widely by industry.
- Talent flows. Which companies a firm hires from and loses people to. Flows show who a company actually competes with for talent, which is often a different list from who it competes with for customers.
- Job postings and time to fill. What a company is trying to hire for now, and how long roles stay open. Postings show intent; headcount shows results.
- Compensation. Modeled base and total pay by role and geography, built from visa filings, postings, and self-reported data.
- Employee sentiment. Review ratings across topics such as career growth, leadership, and job security, ranked by how strongly each tracks hiring and attrition.
You can look up headcount for any company in our free company directory. The other six measures, with history and breakdowns, along with more recent updates, live in the Revelio Terminal and our data feeds.
How different teams use workforce data
The same seven measures answer very different questions depending on who is asking. Here is how the groups we work with most use them, and how each gets access.
Academic researchers and economists
Researchers use workforce data to study career mobility, the spread of new skills, the labor market effects of AI, and how firms respond to shocks. The work usually needs individual-level records rather than dashboards.
- Individual records cover profiles, job transitions, postings, reviews, and layoff notices, delivered as files or to a cloud warehouse
- Model versions can be pinned, so a result can be reproduced after our taxonomies update
- The full methodology is documented for citation
- Revelio Public Labor Statistics and the AI Labor Market Tracker are free every month
Students and faculty should first ask their library whether the institution already licenses Revelio data, including through WRDS. For a new research project, see our research datasets.
Investors
Hiring slows, attrition spikes, and senior people leave before any of it appears in a quarterly filing. Investors track those changes across a portfolio or a coverage universe.
- Datasets map to tickers, ISINs, and CUSIPs, with parent and subsidiary structures resolved
- Preset universes include the S&P 500, Russell 1000, NASDAQ 100, FTSE 100, and EUROSTOXX 50
- Delivery runs to Snowflake, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, or SFTP
- Private companies are covered as well as public ones, which matters for venture and private equity screening
See how investors use Revelio data.
Consultants
Consultants need a fast, defensible benchmark: how a client's hiring, attrition, and pay compare with its peers. They also need it for targets in diligence, where no internal data is available.
- Map a client's own list of companies to Revelio's coverage in one step
- Compare a client with a modeled peer set on any dashboard, then download the chart as a slide
- Build custom report templates and run them for each new client
Start a free trial and run a benchmark on a current client.
Corporate HR, strategy, and finance teams
Inside companies, the questions are competitive. Are rivals hiring for roles we are not? Where do our leavers go? What do competitors pay for the same job in the same city?
- Compare headcount, hiring, attrition, and pay against named competitors
- See which companies you lose talent to, by role and location
- Check how tight a local market is for a role before opening an office there
Talk to a workforce expert about your competitor set.
HR tech and data platforms
Platforms build Revelio data into their own products, from recruiting tools to market maps.
- An API for programmatic access
- Bulk data feeds for warehouse-scale use
- An MCP connector that lets AI agents query company workforce data directly
Talk to a workforce expert about integration options.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I find employee count data for a company?
Revelio's free company directory shows current headcount and workforce composition for companies worldwide. Historical headcount, hiring and attrition rates, and breakdowns by role or location are available in the Revelio Terminal and through data feeds.
How accurate is workforce data built from professional profiles?
After reweighting and nowcasting, Revelio's monthly US employment change correlates with the BLS establishment survey at 0.77, compared with 0.67 between BLS and ADP. Coverage is strongest for professional and white-collar roles, and the data undercounts very large swings such as mass furlough recalls.
Is there free labor market data?
Yes. Revelio Public Labor Statistics is a free monthly release covering US employment, job openings, hiring and attrition, salaries, and mass layoff notices. It is published the day before the BLS jobs report, alongside the AI Labor Market Tracker.
Can students and academic researchers get access?
Many universities license Revelio data, so check with your library first. Researchers can also request research datasets for a specific project, and anyone can start a free trial of the Terminal.
How far back does the data go?
Workforce data, including headcount, flows, and pay, goes back to 2008. Job postings data starts in 2021.
How is the data delivered?
Through the Revelio Terminal, an API, an MCP connector for AI agents, pre-built reports, and bulk data feeds to Snowflake, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, or SFTP.