You have a list of companies and their open roles. You want one number per company: how hard is this company hiring, right now?
That number is easy to compute and easy to get wrong in ways that look plausible. Here's a design that survives contact with real data, and the specific mistakes that inflate every naive version.
The three inputs
Volume. How many roles are open. The most obvious input and the least interesting on its own, because it scales with company size. Ten open roles at a fifty-person startup means something very different from ten at a ten-thousand-person bank.
Seniority mix. What kind of roles. Weight senior and executive postings higher. A company creating a director-level position it never had is starting something; a company posting three interns is running a graduate scheme. Seniority is the closest proxy for "new initiative" that a job title gives you.
