Facebook ($FB), Amazon ($AMZN), Apple ($AAPL), Netflix ($NFLX), and Google ($GOOG). Together, these companies are grouped as the "FAANG" stocks, but we recognize them as five tech companies that are among the most powerful businesses in the world.
In order to partially normalize the data (and to run reasonable queries), we'll be comparing job listings data from the last week of this quarter.
"Manager" "Engineer"
Unsurprisingly, the blanket terms of "Manager" and "Engineer" were the most common keywords across all five FAANG companies.
For example, here is a look at Facebook job openings over the past week:
And here's what job listings look like for Amazon.
This is all understandable; tech companies need engineers to work on their products, and managers to... well, manage them.
But looking deeper into the word clouds, especially over time, gives an idea of what each of these five companies look for outside of managers and engineers. In order to look into this, we removed all jobs that contained the words "engineer" and "manager" for all companies and looked at what new words were most common in those filtered listings.
(Note: Clicking on each word cloud will direct you to the Thinknum database where subscribers can see the data.)
For Facebook, jobs involving operations and research are the most common keywords wtihin its job listings for the past week.
Although the term "PhD" seems interesting to have in a tech company's most common job listings keywords, Facebook has a simple reason for it: the Facebook Fellowship Program, where it wants doctorate students to work for the company while pursuing a degree. It's definitely a way to get highly educated people in the company's job pipeline, to say the least.
Other interesting keywords include "community," "response," and "policy," which all seem to be in line with jumps in the number of "privacy" jobs at the company following all of its privacy controversies this year.
Amazon
Amazon cheats in a few more engineer jobs by putting in plenty of "Architect" jobs within its listings.
Although an architect and an engineer differ in function, architect jobs are usually taken by more senior engineers who want to focus more on theoretical design, or planning the structure and interactions of different software within a network.
Another unique quirk for Amazon job listings is the fact that "team" is among the top-10 most common words within all of the company's job listings over the past week. The company usually calls its Warehouse and Shopper employees "team members" rather than employees, which has some unique effects on corporate culture.
Apple
Apple posts plenty of individual "retail" jobs, as seen through its past week of job listings.
Given that Apple is the only FAANG company with retail locations (besides Amazon's Whole Foods and their eventual Go stores taking off), it's reasonable to see plenty of retail jobs, including those for "applecare" and "genius" positions.
Netflix
Netflix is a bit different compared to its fellow FAANG peers, and not just in what they produce.
Its job listings had "production" as one of its top keywords, which is understandable given that Netflix makes original content.
However, Netflix also differs from the pack in terms of listing locations within its job titles, rather than having them just in the full listing information. Among the top-50 keywords in Netflix positions are "India," "Japan," "Latin," and "APAC" (Asia-Pacific). No other FAANG company lists these regions, let alone any countries, as common as Netflix does.
Netflix has focused on expansion into Japan and India for quite some time, and while it hasn't been easy, it is showing trends towards a more international scope, even through its own job listings.
Google loves its own name; although Apple can claim its own name as the second most common word in its non engineer or manager listings, Google is the most common keyword in the company's own listings. This is understandable, as some of the company's key products — the search engine, cloud storage software, mapping system, etc. — are named after the company itself.
Speaking of the "cloud," job listings containing that word were the third most common among all jobs over the past week. This is peculiar as hiring for "cloud" related positions have been down at the company over the past year... But then again, hiring at the company is down heading out of the new year anyways.
Subscribers can run their own word clouds, such as one for Google jobs over the past three months, here.
