[Free Compass Playground] Pre-earning call...Nvidia isn’t the only chipmaker making news as Qualcomm staffs up to connect the Internet of Things. Plus: is Disney shadow-morphing into a tech company? Pre-earnings call and more!
This week, Nvidia isn’t the only chipmaker making news as Qualcomm staffs up to connect the Internet of Things.
Plus: is Disney shadow-morphing into a tech company? Its software hiring blitz hints yes. Yeti coolers have their moment in the sun; students ditch Chegg for greener cheating pastures; and CEO Marc Benioff is putting the sales back in Salesforce.
Read to the end for the latest labor demand trends at Nvidia, Dollar Tree, Intuit, and Snowflake, all with earnings calls coming next week.
To explore our data yourself, give our free Compass Playground a try—it’s a no-strings preview of the world’s most accurate dataset on job openings. If you love getting behind the brick wall of official company reporting, you’re gonna love this platform.
The chipmaker reported earnings last week that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, cementing its recovery after the Covid chip supply shock. As the company looks to diversify its position beyond supplying the world with smartphone chips, hiring trends suggest the pivot may be upon us.
The Compass Compare graph below shows Qualcomm edging out competitors in the human capital game, with job openings up over 50% from the top of the year. An advanced job description search reveals a 110% increase in demand for roles with skills in Internet of Things engineering over the last quarter—it’s a valuable glimpse into Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon’s strategy “to transform Qualcomm…into a connected computing company for the age of AI.”
Company Compare: Chip Makers Daily Active Jobs Index since January 1, 2024
Skill Demand: Job Openings with Internet of Things skill requirement since 8/1/24
We’ve been writing since August about the connection between Disney’s full court press on software hiring and their newly profitable streaming business. After their earnings report last week, the trend is crystal clear: computer related roles at Disney have doubled YoY to become the uncontested leader of job openings by occupation. Over the same period, the company added 4.4 million core Disney+ subscribers—blowing consensus estimates out of the water—and generated a profit of $321 million. This is a beautiful example of hiring trends as a leading indicator of company / department performance
% of Job Openings by Occupation at Disney YoY
Disney Software Development Hiring has doubled YoY
Yeti coolers heat up with hiring trends to match outsized sales
The Texan cooler and drinkware company posted strong sales in the last quarter, beating analysts’ revenue expectations by over $8 million. The graph below maps the last four years of LinkUp job openings data at Yeti against actual sales by the company. The graph marks a strong correlation between volume of job listings and sales performance, with spikes in job openings leading spikes in sales by ~2-3 months.
Yeti Job Openings Mapped Against Actual Sales since June 1, 2020
Not so long ago, if students wanted to cheat on their homework, they’d do it the old fashioned way: by subscribing to the question and answer ed-tech platform Chegg. With the ascension of gen AI chatbots, many Chegg subscribers have jumped ship for the all-inclusive (and free!) plagiarism machine that is Chat GPT. In its earnings call this week, the erstwhile pioneer reported a whopper quarterly loss of $212 million and a second round of company-wide layoffs since June. OpenAI launched their first installment of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022; Compass data on job openings at Chegg since September of 2022 shows the long decline of a death by 1,000 AI cuts.
Chegg Job Openings Down 80% since November 2022 launch of ChatGPT
After launching their genAI assistant, Agentforce, last month, the CRM giant reported plans this week for a massive hiring push to meet client demand. This is a reversal of employment fortunes for Salesforce who, for the last two years, has focused on workforce efficiency cuts. Compass graphs below show job openings for sales roles spiking since the beginning of October, well in advance of last week’s announcement.
LinkUp data consistently demonstrates that increased sales hiring is a strong indicator of future outperformance—as companies plan to drop major new products or beef up existing lines of business, you’ll often see the strategies in their job openings first.
Occupational Breakdown at Salesforce since September 1, 2024
New Daily Sales Job Openings at Salesforce since January 1, 2024
Before the Earnings Call:
LinkUp is highlighting recent hiring trends at four companies set to report earnings next week. The data below is meant to provide additional insight ahead of official reports, and not to stand alone as an indicator of earnings results.
Every day, LinkUp indexes millions of job listings directly from more than 67,000 employer websites. In aggregate, this data tells the story of company health over time, strategic approaches to growth, signals of distress, and in-demand skills.
