Company research

Why "number of employees" misleads, and what to read instead

The employee figure on a company profile can be a range, an average, a year-end count or a whole group's total. Here is how to tell which one you are looking at, and which records give a better answer, with a live Slovak example.

By Evolc11 November 20267 min read

A small cream paper office building on an ivory ground, surrounded by four measuring tools: a wooden folding ruler leaning on its wall, a brass kitchen scale, a glass measuring jug and a coiled olive tape measure. — Editorial illustration created with AI.

The "number of employees" on a company profile is rarely one counted number. It may be a range from a statistics office, an average from last year's accounts, a head count on one day, or the worldwide total of a group that the local company belongs to. Before you use it, ask three questions: whose number is it, what does it count, and when was it true. Then read three better records: the notes to the filed accounts for the count, staff costs for the trend, and job adverts filtered by location for the direction.

This matters whenever size drives a decision: a seller pricing by seats, a recruiter judging a team, a job seeker picturing the office.

1. Four different numbers share one label

Most profiles, including ours, show one line called "Employees". Behind that line there can be any of these.

What an "employees" figure may actually be
Figure	What it counts	Where it comes from	Weakness
Size band	A range, such as 50 to 99	A statistics office or business register	Wide, and updated rarely
Average for the year	Full-time equivalents averaged over twelve months	Notes to the annual accounts	Describes last year
Year-end head count	People employed on the last day of the year	Notes to the annual accounts	One day, already past
Group total	Everyone in every country	The group's website or annual report	Says nothing about one office

A full-time equivalent counts working time, not people: two half-time employees make one.

A band is the roughest of the four. A company with 50 people and a company with 99 sit in the same band, so one can nearly double, or the other nearly halve, and the profile will not change.

Two identical glass jars, each with two olive bands marking a lower and an upper level. The left jar holds wooden beads just above the lower band, the right jar is filled almost to the upper band. — A band tells you which jar, not how full it is. Two companies in the same band can differ by almost a factor of two.

2. Ask whose number it is

A brand often covers many legal companies. An international group usually has one registered company per country, and each files its own accounts. The band in a national register belongs to that one local company. The figure on the group's website belongs to all of them together.

If you sell to the Bratislava office, the group's thousands of staff are not your buyers. If you sell to the group, the local company's band undersells the account.

To find out which you have, look for the legal name and company number next to the figure, then open the company register and check the shareholders. A foreign parent company as the owner tells you there is a group behind the local entry.

3. Find the counted number in the notes to the accounts

Annual accounts come with notes, a text document that explains the figures. In Slovakia the notes are a PDF attached to the filing in RÚZ, the public register of financial statements, and they contain a short table on staff: the average number of employees for the year, the number on the last day, and how many of them are managers.

This is the one place where the company itself counted. Write the filing date next to the number.

4. Use staff costs for the trend

The profit and loss statement has a line for personnel costs: wages plus the employer's social and health insurance. Compare two years. If the line rises by a fifth, the payroll grew, whatever the band says. If it falls, the company got smaller or cheaper.

Dividing personnel costs by the average number of employees gives a rough cost per person. It is a sanity check, not a salary.

5. Count open roles only where they are

Open roles show intent today, which no filed document can. But groups often run one shared job board for every country, and a local website's "Careers" link leads to it. A tracker that follows that link, ours included, can show the whole group's vacancies on the local company's profile.

So before you read "55 open roles" as growth, open a few adverts and look at the city. Most job boards have a country or location filter, and some show which legal company is hiring.

A wooden pinboard covered with blank paper cards. Yellow threads run from the cards to four paper office buildings around it, while a fifth, smallest building in the foreground has no thread. — One shared job board, many offices. The adverts belong to the buildings the threads lead to. The small office in front shares the board but has no advert of its own.

Worked example · Intrum Slovakia

55 open roles next to 50–99 employees

Intrum Slovakia collects debts and manages receivables for businesses. On 11 November 2026 its Evolc profile shows "Employees 50–99" and "55 open roles". Read together, that looks like a company about to double. The public records say otherwise.

50–99Size bandRÚZ, record changed 3 July 2026

57Average employees, 2025Notes to the accounts, filed 25 June 2026

64Employees on 31 December 2025Same notes

0Open roles in SlovakiaGroup job board, 11 November 2026

Whose number. The Slovak business register lists Intrum Slovakia s.r.o. (a private limited company), IČO 35 831 154, registered on 15 February 2002, owned by two Swedish companies, Intrum Group Operations AB and Intrum Intl AB. The notes to its accounts name Intrum AB in Stockholm as the parent of the whole group. The group website speaks of "8,000+ dedicated employees in 20 European countries". That is the group total, not the Bratislava company.

The band. The company's RÚZ entry gives the size category "50-99 zamestnancov" (50 to 99 employees). The register's open data record names the Statistical Office as the source and was last changed on 3 July 2026.

The count. The notes to the 2025 accounts, filed on 25 June 2026, state an average of 57 employees in full-time equivalents, against 62 in 2024. On 31 December 2025 the company employed 64 people, against 68 a year earlier, four of them managers. Three figures from one page, all inside the band, and all slightly down.

The trend. The same notes show personnel costs of €3,198,317 in 2025 against €3,581,447 in 2024, a fall of about 11%. Divided by the average of 57, that is roughly €56,000 per full-time equivalent, insurance included. The profile shows revenue of about €15.2 million in both years, so the company did the same business with a somewhat smaller team.

The open roles. The first ten adverts on the profile are in Tours, Nantes and Saint-Priest in France, Reigate and Manchester in the United Kingdom, Riga in Latvia and Madrid in Spain. The reason is on the Slovak careers page: its "open positions" link leads to the group's shared job board. On 11 November 2026 that board listed 53 roles in 14 countries, led by Germany with 11 and Latvia with 10. Slovakia is not among the countries, a search for "Bratislava" returns nothing, and Intrum Slovakia s.r.o. does not appear in the board's list of hiring companies.

What this gives you. A Bratislava company of about 60 people that shrank slightly in 2025 and advertised no local roles on the group board today, inside a group of more than 8,000 that is hiring in Germany, Latvia, the United Kingdom and France. A seller sizing a deal for the Slovak office should think in dozens of seats. None of this describes 2026; the next accounts will.

6. Write the size down as a sentence, not a number

A single figure hides everything that matters. A sentence keeps it: "About 60 people in the Slovak company at the end of 2025, according to its accounts; group of 8,000+; no local vacancies on 11 November 2026." Name the company, give the counted figure with its date, and add the direction. Fall back to the band only when no notes exist, and say that it is a band.

Two cautions. Very small companies may file simplified accounts without a staff table. And contractors, agency workers and staff employed by a sister company do not appear in any of these counts, so a team can be larger than its legal employer suggests.

Prompt: how big is this company, really?

Prompt or example to use with your assistant

Using the Evolc Signals MCP, open the profile for [company or domain] with get_company. Then open the sources it links.
1. Whose number: give the legal name, company number and country. Check the company register for shareholders and say whether the company belongs to a group. If the group publishes a worldwide head count, give it separately.
2. Band: the employee band on the profile or in the register, and the date of that record if shown.
3. Count: open the notes to the latest filed accounts. Quote the average number of employees and the number at year end, for the latest year and the year before, with the filing date.
4. Trend: personnel costs for the last two years and the change in percent.
5. Open roles: open the company's job board. Count roles by country and, if the board shows it, by hiring company. Say how many are in [country or city].
Write the result as one sentence that names the company, the counted figure, its date and the direction. Link every figure. If a record is missing, say so; do not estimate.

Try it now: pick a company you know in the Evolc Signals directory. Its profile links the register entry and, where they exist, the filed accounts, and lists the open roles with their locations. Check the "Employees" line against those three before you use it.