FAQ - LinkUp

Are all public companies available?

LinkUp makes every effort to scrape 100% of publicly traded U.S. companies that have jobs on their website. About 15% of public companies currently don’t post jobs on their website. About 75% of companies in our database are privately-held companies.

How are cities identified?

LinkUp gets the city from the job itself, which is not necessarily the company’s headquarters location. Sometimes this is displayed clearly on the job, and sometimes it is "hidden" but still capturable. If the jobs don’t mention a location, we’ll then check to see if the company has multiple addresses/offices/ locations. If they only have one, we make the assumption that all jobs are located there unless we have reason to believe otherwise.

What do you consider a unique company?

LinkUp assigns one company ID to a unique career page. If one company has separate career pages for their various divisions or countries, those would be separate scrapes, therefore separate company IDs.

Why do job counts not match the company's website?

Differences between LinkUp job counts and what appears on a company’s website are common and happen for several reasons. Scrapes run every 24–48 hours, and because data must be parsed and processed before delivery, the counts often reflect an earlier point in time than what you see live. Company portals also typically display listings, while LinkUp counts vacancies, so a single posting with multiple locations can inflate our totals relative to the website. Many large employers split jobs across multiple regional or departmental portals, and while LinkUp attempts to aggregate them, what you’re viewing online may only show a subset. In some cases, company career sites themselves miscount due to bugs, duplicate URLs, expired roles, or inconsistent pagination. We also intentionally skip certain listings—like test posts, general applications, or clearly expired jobs, and sometimes cannot capture roles when formatting is inconsistent, content is embedded externally, or the ATS is unstable. Finally, career sites frequently change, so scrapes occasionally need maintenance. If a particular company is important, you can flag it for review, though we still have to prioritize system-wide stability.

Job-count spikes

Spikes are typically when a company shows a dramatic increase in job count. Spikes can occur when a company changes their Applicant Tracking System, and our spiders find jobs in both places for a few days. This can be easily detected when a job count for a company appears to roughly double, and when it doesn’t stay at that level for more than a few days. The company scrape log exists to provide additional context around spikes and drops in the data. If a return to normal job count correlates with a scrape change, it can be inferred that the change in job count was due to a career portal change rather than an organic change in labor demand.

Job-count drops?

LinkUp uses regular expressions to parse jobs data from web pages. Regular expressions allow us to search for specific text patterns on the page that we’ve manually verified to be a job posting. When an employer changes their careers page, this searching may need to be updated. If the text pattern we’re searching for is no longer there, it results in 0 jobs. If the text pattern is now in a different place on the page, and not on every job post, we may report fewer than the correct amount but not 0. If the text pattern is now in more places than on every post we may get more than the correct amount.

How Linkup Handles Company Mergers and Acquisitions

When a company is acquired, acquires another company, or is involved in a merger, Linkup must decide how to treat the Company IDs (CIDs) involved which best serves the data. In this article, you will find scenario-based details that explain how companies are handled after an acquisition, merger, rebrand or spin-off occurs.

Rebranding

When a company rebrands, LinkUp will update the name of the CID to match the new name of the rebranded company. For example, Facebook rebranded to Meta. In response, LinkUp updates the Facebook CID to Meta. The benefit of renaming the existing CID is that we keep the history and data tied to the same company, rather than creating a new CID for the same company but with a new name.

Mergers

After a company completes a merger, LinkUp decides how to treat the CID by looking at how or where the jobs can be found for the new company. See below for three scenarios.

Merger Case 1: Company A and Company B merge to create Company C and the jobs for Company A and B are found on the ATS for Company C.

Linkup Response: Create a new CID for Company C, keep Company A & B for historical records but remove jobs.

Merger Case 2: Company A and Company B merge to create Company C but the jobs were consolidated to either Company A or Company B's ATS but not both.

Linkup Response: Create a new CID for Company C and migrate the scrape for the remaining ATS to the new CID. This response assumes the jobs are found entirely on either Company A's ATS or Company B's ATS but not both.

Merger Case 3: Company A and Company B merge to create Company C but the jobs were not consolidated to a single ATS and remain in place on Company A and Company B ATS.

Linkup Response: Create a new CID for Company C and migrate the scrapes for both Company A and Company B ATS under the new CID for Company C.

Acquisitions

When one company acquires another, the way job postings are handled varies. Jobs may move to the parents company or to the child company or there may be no change at all. See below for three scenarios and how Linkup responds to company acquisitions.

Acquisition Case 1: Company A acquires Company B but the jobs for Company A remain on Company A's website and jobs for Company B remain on Company B's website. There is no change to how job openings are listed.

Linkup Response: Until there is a change to how the jobs are posted, Linkup does not make any changes.

Acquisition Case 2: Company A acquires Company B and moves job postings for Company B to Company A's ATS.

Linkup Response: Stop scraping Company B ATS and retire the CID, continue scraping jobs from Company A.

Acquisition Case 3: Company A acquires Company B. Company A migrates job openings to Company B's ATS.

Linkup Response: Replace the code in the scrape at Company A with the code from Company B. Retire Company B.

Spin-Off Company

When a company spins off another company or service as a new company, Linkup will create a new CID for the new company and make no other changes.

Alternatively, we often require a job posting to have some location information to be considered valid. We also use regular expressions to parse that information. If the employer changes their postings to no longer have locations (or changes where/how that information is displayed) on every job, we may not report those jobs. Resulting in fewer jobs, but not necessarily 0.

What do you consider a unique job?

LinkUp collapses on the URL and therefore considers each unique URL one job. Most ATS’ generate a new URL for a new job.

Historical Job Description Coverage

2014: LinkUp started indexing job descriptions.

2015: 50%

2016: 90%

2018: 99.9%

How are tickers mapped?

LinkUp partners with FactSet for mapping our companies to tickers. Our ticker reference file contains fields for ticker, exchange, and exchange country, along with start and end dates to reflect change over time. Tickers are updated regularly.