Job function

A job function is the kind of work a role does, such as engineering, sales, finance or operations, regardless of its title, seniority or the department that employs it. Classifying postings by function makes hiring comparable across companies that name teams and titles differently.

Function, title and department

Three attributes of a posting are easily mixed. The title is the employer's wording, and the department is the employer's own grouping. The function is a category from a fixed list that says what kind of work the role is. Three illustrative postings from Acme Robotics show the difference, with the function a reader would assign:

Seniority, the level of the role, is a separate attribute, covered under seniority level.

How it appears in Fokals data

Every posting in Job Postings carries one of 26 job functions under the frozen label version jobs-v2, from software engineering and performance marketing to clinical healthcare and other, alongside its seniority and ten role flags. The department and team stay as the employer published them, so the assigned function and the employer's wording sit side by side. Because providers choose their own lists, compare functions within one list.

Hiring Activity counts a company's open postings per function each day. The function share family in Market Series gives the share of postings opened in each window that fall in each function, by industry, country and size band. To follow the engineering share of one company, in PostgreSQL:

select day,
       coalesce((by_function::jsonb ->> 'software_engineering')::int, 0) * 1.0
         / nullif(open_postings, 0) as engineering_share
from company_hiring_daily
where company_id = :company_id
order by day;

Reading it with care

Three habits keep a function share honest:

• Read shares over many postings, not one: a small company's share from ten postings moves with a single role.
• Compare a company's share with its industry's, which the market series give, and not with a fixed level.

The fields are defined in the data dictionary, and the postings are in the hiring dataset.

Related terms

• Seniority level: the rank of a role, read beside its function.
• Hiring data: job postings as a signal of where a company invests.
• Label version: the frozen name under which function labels are produced.
• Same-store cohort: the comparison group that keeps market shares comparable over time.

Frequently asked questions

The queries and code on this page are examples to adapt. Test them in your own environment before you rely on them.