Starter Index

Starter Index is a company search and analytics platform that helps students and graduates make better-informed career decisions. It brings together public data on Belgian companies to make their size, growth, stability, and workforce history easier to understand.

The Problem

Finding a first job is more than finding a vacancy. Students and graduates have little insight into the companies they're applying to. Job boards show open positions, while company websites show how businesses want to present themselves. Neither necessarily tells you what's happening behind the scenes.

Is the company growing or shrinking?
Has its workforce changed significantly over the past few years?
How large is the company, and what might that mean for the working environment?
Is there enough information to get a better picture of its stability?

Starter Index aims to make that information easier to find by bringing scattered public data together in one searchable index.

The project is currently in private beta, used for personal research, testing, and data validation.

How It Works

Starter Index collects data from multiple public sources, normalizes it, and connects records to the correct company. The goal is to turn fragmented information into something that can be searched, compared, and understood.

Data Sources

1. Official company records

Official records provide the foundation of the index, including enterprise numbers, legal structures, registered addresses, and company status. This helps identify businesses and distinguish active companies from dissolved or inactive entities.

2. Financial and workforce data

Public financial filings, including annual accounts published through the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), provide insight into company size, reported employment, and changes over time where the data is available.

3. Hiring and labour market data

Public job listings and other available labour market signals help track recruitment activity and identify changes in hiring patterns.

Data Pipeline

The data comes from different sources, each with its own structure, naming conventions, and update frequency. Before it becomes useful, it needs to be processed.

The pipeline handles:

Entity resolution: Matching records to the correct company using enterprise numbers and other identifiers.
Normalization: Converting different data formats into a consistent internal structure.
Deduplication: Preventing duplicate records from distorting results.
Trend analysis: Comparing historical data to identify changes in company size, employment, and hiring activity.

The result is a unified company index designed for fast search, filtering, and comparison.

What You Can Learn About a Company

Starter Index focuses on signals that can help students evaluate potential employers before applying.

| Signal | What it tells you | |---|---| | Company size | How large the organization is and, where available, how its workforce is structured. | | Growth | How reported employment and other available indicators change over time. | | Hiring activity | Whether public vacancies suggest changes in recruitment activity. | | Workforce changes | Whether available data indicates workforce expansion or contraction. | | Company status | Whether the business is officially active and what information is available about its operations. |

These signals provide context, not guarantees. Growth doesn't automatically mean a good workplace, and a shrinking workforce doesn't necessarily mean a company is in trouble. The goal is to give users more information to make their own decisions.

MCP Server Integration

To make querying the index faster and more flexible, I also built a custom MCP (Model Context Protocol) server connected directly to the database. This allows AI assistants and developer tools to look up companies, inspect headcount metrics, and analyze workforce stability conversationally.

Currently, this is only used for personal workflows and internal testing, with plans to potentially release it alongside a dedicated student-facing chatbot in a future update.

Current Status

Starter Index is in private beta. The index covers active Belgian companies, with data processing and search functionality being tested against real-world records.

The current focus is on building a reliable foundation: accurate company matching, useful historical data, and fast search. From there, the aim is to make it easier for students and graduates to compare employers using more than job listings and marketing claims.