We are living through a period of profound transition. Labor demand has cooled after years of extraordinary churn, demographic pressures are mounting, migration flows are tightening, and artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape how work gets done. These overlapping forces are creating a labor market that is fast-moving, fragmented, and increasingly difficult to measure with traditional tools alone.

That challenge was the focus of Indeed’s inaugural Labor Market Data Summit in Washington, D.C., where economists, data scientists, policymakers, and business leaders came together to discuss how private sector data can complement official statistics. Together, these perspectives provide a more complete and timely view of labor market dynamics to help policymakers and institutions better understand what is happening now and where the pressure points may emerge next.

A Powerful Synergy: The Early Signal

Indeed has a unique view of the global labor market, sitting at the intersection of both supply and demand. By analyzing millions of job postings, searches, wages, and Job Seeker ProfilesIndeed data (worldwide), job seeker accounts that have a unique, verified email address across more than 60 countries, we can identify and quantify the nuanced stories behind the headline numbers.

Traditional government statistics remain essential benchmarks and provide decades of historical context, but they often can’t keep up with the rapid pace of the modern economy. Indeed’s proprietary data provides an almost real-time, global early signal, helping us better understand where the market has come from and where it is going.

Decoding the Data: Speed, Freshness, and Detail

What makes our data so useful at helping our partners navigate this complexity? A few things stand out: 

  • High-frequency: While many official reports are a monthly snapshot, Indeed data is a continuous feed. Our Job Postings Index tracks millions of daily changes as they happen.
  • Real-time: In a fast-moving economy, information that is even a few weeks old can be outdated. We provide data with minimal delay, showing today’s hiring trends today, not months from now.
  • Granular: Our data allows us to zoom in at the metro level, into a single occupation, across thousands of job attributes including specific skills or credentials, and at job seeker behavior including clicks and applications.

Bridging the Gap Between Data and Decision

At the summit, our Indeed Hiring Lab team and guest speakers showed that access to this timely, granular, always-on data enables policymakers and researchers to do much more than just track numbers. We highlighted three ways our data enables us and our international partners to surface findings that shape modern workforce policy:

  • Real-time monitoring: We use our public Data Portal indicators to track movement in the market (hiring demand, wage growth, and remote work trends) as it happens across 60+ countries.
  • Measuring the impact of shocks: Beyond basic monitoring, the data allows us to measure how major global events, economic shifts, or spending cuts specifically reshape labor markets in different regions and sectors.
  • Connecting decisions to action: Ultimately, this data provides a window into how decisions by firms and governments, from new regulations to political actions, directly affect the behavior and choices of both workers and employers. 

This isn’t just theoretical. We are seeing this data put to work in real-time by the world’s leading economic institutions. We were joined at the summit by experts from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Bank of Canada, and the Ministry of Economy in Spain, who shared how they utilize Indeed’s microdata to “nowcast” official statistics. By using our high-frequency signals to predict trends before traditional reports are released, these partners can inform critical policy with greater confidence. 

Scaling The Indeed Policy Partner Program

One of the most important themes of the summit was how this type of real-time data can support better policymaking. Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Indeed’s Policy Partner Program has delivered labor market data to the world’s leading policymakers, marrying technology, data, and public policy for global impact. 

Today, more than 20 central banks and international organizations, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Reserve Bank of Australia, use Indeed insights to dissect economic effects, inform monetary policy discussions, and monitor labor market health in real time.

To advance this work in 2026, we are expanding the Indeed Policy Partner program through:

  • The Hiring Lab API: A new enterprise-grade delivery platform that enables policy organizations to access and integrate the aggregate labor market data published on data.indeed.com directly into their own analytical tools and dashboards. The API provides structured access to Indeed Hiring Lab datasets covering trends in job postings, wages, remote work, and AI-related roles across multiple countries.
  • Unmatched data scale: Our program now encompasses 604 million job postings across eight core countries, spanning 124,000 normalized job titles.
  • Rich attribute insights: We now provide over 9 billion job posting attributes, including specific skills and credentials, to help policymakers identify emerging gaps as they happen.

Looking Ahead

The challenges facing labor markets today are complex. But with the right tools, the right partnerships, and a shared commitment to evidence, we can navigate uncertainty with clarity and purpose.

At Indeed, our mission is simple: to help people get jobs. And at the Hiring Lab, it always starts with the data. But it never ends there. Our goal is always around interpretation and helping policymakers, employers, and job seekers understand not just what is happening, but why it is happening, and what it might mean for the months and years ahead.Explore our latest research or dive into the numbers yourself through our Hiring Lab Data Portal.