Indeed ranks top US job markets

09.03.09 | No Comments | by: Dave Jeyes

Indeed_June09_Job_rankings

Job search engine Indeed.com is one of my favorite ways to search for jobs across the Web. The team at Indeed also created this interesting infographic to give job seekers an idea of where the top job markets are.

The blue chairs on the left represent job openings indexed by Indeed during the month of June. The orange people represent the number of unemployed people available to fill those roles.

This very simple chart easily displays the ratio of jobs to available people with simple icons that are very easy to read. Some may warn that the number of job postings may be a better representation of the number of recruitment firms in an area than the number of jobs.

I’d have to disagree with this analysis. It’s plain to see that the Washington, DC area outstrips the rest of the county by more than double the number of jobs to people ratios, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s rife with recruiters any more than other towns.

For instance the San Jose area, also known as the Silicon Valley is host to a large technical community and hundreds of recruitment firms. However we don’t see the same wildly larger ratio there. Besides, if the DC market were that flooded with recruiting companies, the market wouldn’t be able to support them. The fact that everywhere else in the country seems to have a similar ratio points me to an entirely different conclusion.

It seems to me that DC has more available jobs because of the fact that it’s the epicenter of federal government contracting. Government contractors have years-long contracts with Uncle Sam that tend to make them able to outlast a recession in the near term. The market here has different peaks and valleys, so government spending cuts could also cut DC’s job market down to size as well.

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