What is the weighted rating of a location?

The weighted rating represents how promising we believe a location will be as a base of operations for your business. The weighted rating takes into account your preferences for supply, cost, competition, and headcount. 



What can I use the weighted rating for?

You can use a location’s weighted rating to assess whether it might be a promising place to establish a presence. You can use the sliders for supply, cost, and competition, as well as the headcount filter, to ensure that the ratings reflect your organization’s approach to hiring. For example, if your company typically pays above the market average, but needs a large, consistent talent pipeline, you can set the “low cost” slider to “somewhat important” and the “high supply” slider to “very important.”



Acquire: Where do you get the data?

The values used to calculate the weighted rating are derived from the supply, demand, and salary in a given location. Learn more about our sources of supply, demand, and salary data. 



Organize: How do you prepare this data for analysis?

Each metric used to calculate the weighted ratings has a unique preparation process to ensure its quality. Learn more about how we prepare our supply, demand, and salary data for analysis. 



Analyze: How do you calculate the weighted rating?

Before calculating the weighted rating, we must first compile a list of the top locations for the talent you’re looking for. To do this, we use a chi-squared test (a statistical test for independence) to identify the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with disproportionate numbers of job postings relevant to your search. This calculation takes into account the occupation, function, skills, and keywords in your Talent Profile. The locations with the highest chi-squared scores are those that are the most reliable sources for your target talent.


After determining a list of top locations, we then calculate the weighted rating for each of these locations based on six factors:


These six factors are combined and weighted in different ways based on the relative importance assigned to supply, cost, and competition using the sliders. We then rank the list of top locations based on the weighted rating, with “best” locations receiving higher ranks than “better” locations, and so forth.



Deliver: How do you represent the weighted rating? 

We represent weighted rating as one of four categories:

  • Fair

  • Good

  • Better

  • Best



More about weighted rating:


What location types do you provide weighted ratings for?

We calculate weighted ratings for MSAs. We’re not able to provide this a weighted rating for states, cities, or counties. Because some of the factors used to calculate the weighted rating compare the local value to the national value, we cannot calculate weighted ratings for entire countries.



How do you rate locations without supply or salary data?

TalentNeuron breaks the countries we support into three groups depending on the number of key metrics we provide for each. Group A countries are those with salary, supply, and demand data; Group B countries are those with supply and demand data (but no salary); Group C countries are those with demand data (but no supply or salary).


When you search for a location in a Group B or C country, we calculate the weighted rating using the location’s chi-squared score and whichever of the six weighting factors we have data for. For Group C countries, we take into account demand in the last year and competitive concentration (both derived from demand). For Group B countries, we take into account demand in the last year, competitive concentration, supply per position, and national supply ratio.