Smart Competitive Intelligence has organizational benefits beyond knowing how your bottom-line stacks up against the crowd. We talk a lot about how sales, marketing and executive-level strategy is made stronger when it integrates targeted intel, carefully gathered and curated, organized and repurposed into useable assets, usually by Product Marketers.

Here’s how smart competitive intelligence can help HR

– collect information on the hiring practices of rivals
– maintain a database of Who’s Where When – target high-profile leaders in your industry
– forecast staffing needs
– onboard new hires faster and more efficiently, which means less time + more revenue

Tools for collecting #smartci that can save your HR team time and money

1) LinkedIn

Search and follow key players at rival organizations:

– Track new hires for insight on new developments – did they just hire a big VR name?
– Map hiring trends – are they making moves into a new region?
– Follow thought leaders within rival orgs for insights into their big-picture vision and tactical moves.

Monitor connections:

– Note new connections to potential customers (yours?!)
– Track new connections outside of their existing operating space – are they preparing or move to a new vertical?

2) Slideshare

Prolific sharers are often leaders within an organization. They’re the ones your potential buyers are getting their information from. Hire them or copy them.

3) Indeed

Tracking the job postings of your rivals on sites like Indeed is a great way to monitor their hiring patterns. Are they amping up dev ops or maybe expanding to a new region? What tier level are they staffing? What are the most common attributes valued in their postings?

4) Glassdoor

Glassdoor lets you peek behind-the-doors of your competitors via reviews from employees (past and present). It can be eye-opening. Find intel on salaries, interview practices, and benefits, as well as first-person opinions of management and CEO performance. That’s the kind of information you can use in recruiting, onboarding and sales enablement.

5) Twitter

If you’re using a tool like BuzzSumo, then you can run searches for Influencers and track their promotional activity, connections and title changes.

6) Corporate Websites

Scraping competitor websites is a big job. It’s time-consuming. And where do you put it after you clip it? That’s what I thought…

7) Win-loss Analysis

Or, you can find one tool to do all the heavy-lifting (read: unfun searching, scraping and monitoring) for you!