Platform-First asks what appears in one place: every new job ad in a region, every tender in a sector, every register notice in a district. Source-First asks what a specific market player publishes itself. The first question is “where?”, the second “who?”. Both often see the same event, such as a new vacancy at a competitor, but from different directions.
This page compares the two logics using three pairs: job board and careers page, tender portal and press release, register notice and company announcement. It sets out what each logic delivers and where it reaches its limits, when each one fits and how they work together. For an overview of all three approaches, including Topic-First, see Market Monitoring: Topic-First, Source-First, Platform-First.
Two questions: where and who
A hypothetical example: a provider of logistics software wants to know what is happening in its market. It can follow every new job ad for logistics IT in its region. Then it sees which companies are hiring, including ones it does not know. Or it can follow the careers pages, newsletters and press sections of its ten most important competitors. Then it sees what exactly those ten announce, including things that never appear on a platform.
The difference lies in the starting point. A platform is a place run by a third party where many senders publish entries of the same kind. A channel belongs to one particular source. Platform-First decides which place to watch and takes every sender that posts there. Source-First decides which senders matter and follows them across every channel they publish on.
Three pairs that show the difference
Job board and careers page
Job ads are publications by the employer. Eurostat defines online job advertisements as “postings published on the internet by employers” (opens in a new tab) looking for candidates with specific skills. Where they appear varies. Data collectors draw on both: Cedefop’s Skills-OVATE uses ads “collected from thousands of sources, including private job portals, public employment service portals, recruitment agencies, online newspapers and corporate websites” (opens in a new tab). The German IAB job vacancy survey lists a vacancy on the company’s own website and one on internet job boards (opens in a new tab) as separate recruitment methods (question 43, in German).
From this, the site proposes an assessment of its own. None of the sources puts it in these words: the careers page is a channel of the source; the job board is a platform of many senders. Following a competitor’s careers page is Source-First. Filtering a job board by region and occupation is Platform-First.
Tender portal and press release
Public contracts above the EU thresholds are advertised on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) (opens in a new tab), which according to TED publishes over 3 000 procurement notices every weekday. Directive 2014/24/EU (opens in a new tab) requires notices to be sent to the Publications Office of the EU and published there. In Germany, § 40 of the Public Procurement Regulation (opens in a new tab) (in German) allows national publication only after that, or 48 hours after the Publications Office confirms receipt. Here the law prescribes where the notice appears first.
On the other side are the contracting authority’s own channels. A hypothetical example: a city announces in a press release that it will replace its street lighting, long before a procurement procedure begins. If you follow the city as a source, you learn about it early. If you only follow TED, you learn about it when the notice appears, but then with business sector and place of performance as structured fields (opens in a new tab).
Register notice and company announcement
In Germany, entries in the commercial register are made public by being retrievable for the first time in the electronic system (§ 10 HGB (opens in a new tab), in German). That applies, for example, to every change of managing director of a limited company (§ 39 GmbHG (opens in a new tab), in German). The joint register portal of the German states (opens in a new tab) (in German) contains the registers of all states and the register notices.
Besides the register, there is the company’s own announcement. Issuers that have requested or obtained admission of their financial instruments to trading on a regulated market or trading facility in the EU announce some things themselves. Under Article 17 of the Market Abuse Regulation (opens in a new tab), “an issuer shall inform the public as soon as possible” of inside information that directly concerns it. It keeps that information on its website for at least five years. The register shows that something has changed. The company’s own announcement shows how the company itself presents it.
What each logic delivers and where it reaches its limits
Platform-First delivers completeness within the place. If you filter a platform by fixed fields, you also see senders you did not know. Official statistics use exactly this. Eurostat uses online job ads to break down vacancies by occupation and region. The aim is “to inform policy makers, employers, and jobseekers about occupations or regions with comparatively higher or lower labour demand” (opens in a new tab).
The limits are well studied. Not every vacancy is posted online. According to Eurostat, IT positions are more frequently posted on the internet (opens in a new tab) than jobs in small shops such as butchers or bakeries, or in the public sector. The same ad may be counted multiple times (opens in a new tab) if it is posted on several portals. And Eurostat stresses that “OJAs are not equivalent to job vacancies” (opens in a new tab). And the data can change: Germany’s Federal Statistical Office had to give up a fixed selection of five job portals (opens in a new tab) (in German). Their ads had largely dropped out of the underlying Cedefop dataset in 2020 and 2021.
Source-First delivers a sender in context. If you follow a company as a source, you see the vacancy next to the product announcement, the CEO’s post and the trade fair appearance. The measurement association AMEC calls such channels “owned media” (opens in a new tab): websites, company blogs, newsletters and brand accounts on social media.
The limit is the list. Whoever is not on it is missing. The list needs maintaining, and each source has several channels that you follow one by one. Unlike on a platform, there are no fixed fields: what ten competitors publish cannot be set side by side as easily as ten entries on the same job board. And a source shows only what it wants to say.
Comparison at a glance
The table is an assessment based on the evidence above, not a measurement.
| Platform-First | Source-First | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | Where? What appears in this place? | Who? What is this market player saying? |
| Starting point | A platform and fixed fields such as region, sector, category | A list of sources with their channels |
| What you get | Every entry of one kind, including from unknown senders | The content specific senders publish themselves, across all channels |
| Strength | Overview of a market, new names, comparable fields | Context, announcements before the formal entry, the sender’s own account |
| Limits | Only what is on the platform; bias, duplicates, an ad is not a hire | Only who is on the list; sources speak in their own interest |
| Typical use | Who is hiring, tendering, filing, founding? | What is a specific competitor, customer or association planning? |
When Platform-First is the right choice
When you do not know the senders yet. A hypothetical example: a recruitment agency watches job boards to see which companies are looking for staff. A list of sources would only show what its known clients are doing. The job board also shows the companies it could approach next.
When the platform is the designated place. For public contracts above the thresholds, TED is where the notice appears. Germany’s patent office describes its free DPMAregister as “suitable for the regular and systematic checking of newly published IP rights as part of a monitoring search” (opens in a new tab).
When you want to compare a market as a whole. Eurostat reports, for example, that in 2023 sales, marketing and development managers had the highest online job advertisement rate in the EU, at 26.6% (opens in a new tab). The rate is measured as job ads per person employed. Statements like that only come from the full set of entries, not from a list of individual employers.
When Source-First is the right choice
When it is about specific market players. If you want to know what a particular competitor is planning, you want its own statements, including those that never appear on a platform. Writing in Harvard Business Review (opens in a new tab), Wei Shi calls the jobs a competitor is trying to fill “one of the clearest and most accessible signals of strategic intent”. If you follow the competitor as a source, you read that signal alongside everything else it says.
When context matters. A register notice reports a change of managing director. What the new managing director plans, if it is said anywhere, is said on the company’s own channels.
When timing matters. An announcement on a company’s own channel can come before the formal entry on a platform. This is an assessment, not a measurement; how large the gap is depends on the case.
How to build and maintain a list of sources is covered in Source-First in practice.
How they work together: the platform finds, the source tells
The two logics combine in a simple sequence. The platform shows a new sender: a company hiring in your region, a contracting authority tendering for the first time, a newly registered company. That sender goes on the list of sources, and from then on you follow it on its own channels.
In the other direction, you can query a platform for a known source. The EPO’s Register Alert service lets you monitor up to 5 000 files (opens in a new tab) of your choice. That lets you check whether an announcement is followed by action, such as job ads or patent filings.
The same pattern applies to Topic-First: keywords to find, sources to follow. That is the subject of the comparison Sources, not keywords.
Common objections
“The competitor’s job ads are on the job board anyway.”
Many are, not all. Eurostat notes that certain positions are more likely to be advertised online than others (opens in a new tab), and that its own web scraping does not cover every job portal. If you follow a specific company, you therefore also read its careers page. For the question of who is hiring at all, the job board remains the better starting point.
“Platform data are biased, so they are useless.”
That goes too far. The OECD notes that online job postings have gaps, but “so do other sources” (opens in a new tab). A Cedefop working paper finds common patterns of bias, such as high-skilled occupations and more industrialised regions being overrepresented (opens in a new tab). You need to know the limits. That does not make the data useless.
“Then I will just extract the whole platform automatically.”
There are rules for that: database protection, the job boards’ terms of use, the registers’ conditions. They are set out in the legal section of the overview and on the Platform-First page. Some platforms offer their own interfaces for this, such as the TED Search API. These notes only report what laws and platforms say and are not legal advice.
The question picks the tool
Before choosing, one test is worth running: do I want to know what appears in a place, or what a specific sender says? Platform-First is built for the first, and it does that well: complete within the platform, with fixed fields, including senders you do not know yet. For the second, you start with the sources. Often the answer to the first question is the start of the second.
References
- Eurostat: WIH – OJA Data. Eurostat CROS, undated. https://cros.ec.europa.eu/wih/oja (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Cedefop: Skills-OVATE. Undated. https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/tools/skills-online-vacancies (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- IAB: IAB job vacancy survey questionnaire, fourth quarter 2025 (paper version), p. 4, question 43. In German. https://doku.iab.de/fragebogen/IABSE_Papier-Fragebogen_IV_2025.pdf (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Publications Office of the European Union: About TED. Undated. https://ted.europa.eu/en/about-ted (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement, consolidated version of 1 January 2026, Articles 4 and 51 and Annex VIII. EUR-Lex. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02014L0024-20260101 (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026 via the Publications Office (Cellar))
- German Public Procurement Regulation (VgV), § 40. Gesetze im Internet, in German. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/vgv_2016/__40.html (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- TED Developer Docs: Search API. Undated. https://docs.ted.europa.eu/api/latest/search.html (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- German Commercial Code (HGB), § 10. Gesetze im Internet, in German. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hgb/__10.html (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- German Limited Liability Companies Act (GmbHG), § 39. Gesetze im Internet, in German. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gmbhg/__39.html (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Ministry of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia: Registerportal der Länder, home page. In German, undated. https://www.handelsregister.de/rp_web/welcome.xhtml (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 on market abuse (Market Abuse Regulation), Article 17(1), consolidated version of 5 June 2026. EUR-Lex. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02014R0596-20260605 (opens in a new tab) (accessed 23 September 2026 via the Publications Office (Cellar))
- Eurostat: Job vacancy rate by occupation and region. Experimental statistics, undated. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/experimental-statistics/job-vacancy-rate-occupation-region (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Eurostat: Labour market demand for ICT specialists in online job advertisements. Experimental statistics, undated. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/experimental-statistics/labour-market-demand-ict-specialists (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- German Federal Statistical Office: Experimentelle Daten, Online-Stellenindex. EXSTAT, 5 July 2022, in German. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Service/EXSTAT/Datensaetze/online-stellenindex.html (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- AMEC (International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication): Glossary. Undated. https://amecorg.com/glossary/ (opens in a new tab) (accessed 23 September 2026)
- German Patent and Trade Mark Office: DPMAregister. Undated. https://www.dpma.de/english/search/dpmaregister/index.html (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Eurostat: Which occupations are the most sought on the web? Eurostat News, 10 December 2024. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20241210-2 (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Shi, Wei: What You Can Learn from a Competitor’s Job Postings. Harvard Business Review, 10 August 2026. https://hbr.org/2026/08/what-you-can-learn-from-a-competitors-job-postings (opens in a new tab) (accessed 23 September 2026)
- European Patent Office: European Patent Register. Undated. https://www.epo.org/en/searching-for-patents/legal/register (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Vermeulen, Wessel; Gutierrez Amaros, Fernanda: How well do online job postings match national sources in European countries? OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) Papers 2024/02, DOI 10.1787/e1026d81-en. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/03/how-well-do-online-job-postings-match-national-sources-in-european-countries_5e6fb2bd/e1026d81-en.pdf (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
- Napierala, Joanna; Kvetan, Vladimir; Branka, Jiri: Assessing the representativeness of online job advertisements. Cedefop Working Paper No 17, December 2022, DOI 10.2801/807500. https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/files/6217_en.pdf (opens in a new tab) (accessed 24 September 2026)
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