Employer and Industry Overview

AdeptID classifies employers into industries according to the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS). We use a three-level industry classification taxonomy (the 2-, 3-, and 4-digit levels of NAICS).

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Differences Between Occupation and Industry

In a job market data context, the industry describes the employer while the occupation describes the person or the job. Consider a job opening for an Accountant at a hospital. For this role, the industry is Health Care and Social Assistance, and the occupation is in the Business and Financial Services family.

Employer and Industry Schema

Employer & Industry Example

{
  "employer_name": "American Express",
  "naics_code": "52",
  "naics_industry_name": "Finance and Insurance"
}

Employer and Industry Taxonomy

Use Cases for Employer and Industry Taxonomies

• Employer Standardization: AdeptID standardizes employer names so that variants of the same employer (e.g., American Express and Amex) can be linked. This use case is satisfied using Employer Search.

• Occupation Classification: In cases where job postings or candidates have ambiguous job titles, the industry is used to disambiguate those titles and assign them to the correct occupation. For example, the title ‘Engineer’ at Boeing is likely an Aerospace Engineer, while the title ‘Engineer’ at Microsoft is likely a Software Developer. This use case is satisfied using Occupation Classification.

• Job Matching: Candidates who have worked in an industry or at firms of a particular size may be a good fit for roles at firms with similar attributes. This use case is satisfied using Evaluate Candidates and Evaluate Jobs.

Employer & Industry Taxonomy Details

AdeptID’s employer and industry taxonomies are built from two references - a standardized employer list and the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The reference employer list is used to standardize variants and misspellings of employer names to a standardized list.

Once we have standardized the employer name, the employer is mapped to the NAICS taxonomy. Our system returns employers results from at three levels of granularity in the NAICS taxonomy: the 2-digit level, also called the Industry Sector, the 3-digit, and 4-digit levels.

The Industry Sector (2-digit) level includes common colloquial industries such as Manufacturing, Retail Trade, and Health Care and Social Assistance. This is typically the level that is most easily interpreted by users. The additional levels provide increased granularity as shown in the table below.