Where Are the Jobs? | Indeed.com

Job Trends at Indeed.com:
“Rankings February 2005 — 50 most populous metro areas ranked by job postings per capita”

Laurie’s Comments:

I was recently alerted to a relatively new site called Indeed.com, which is an online employment search engine (it was still in beta test when I first visited it). I was pleased to note that this job search engine actually does what it claims to do. If you enter a search term or keyword and specify that you want only listings that contain that term in the title, it actually returns only listings meeting those specifications.

What a concept! This is in contrast to virtually every other such engine I have run across, where one is forced to wade through many hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant listings in which you are hard-pressed to find the words you specified anywhere in the listing.

I input the title “CIO” and specified that the word MUST appear in the listing title. This yielded 113 listings, some of which were not relevant (such as “Executive Assistant to the CIO”), but overall brought back far more relevant results than I have seen from any other engine. Similarly, when I input “CEO” the engine produced 589 results nationwide, with a fair number of “Executive Assistant to the CEO” and the like, but at least every returned result did actually have the word CEO in the listing title. Listings retrieved came from a variety of sources, including major and niche job boards, corporate sites, and newspapers.

The above were very simple searches. You can specify multiple keywords or keyword phrases, city, state or zip, use quotes to specify phrases, and even use “Boolean” logic to fine-tune your search. The site also features abilities to set up e-mail job alerts and RSS feeds if desired.

But I digress from what originally prompted me to write this… The link cited at the top of this blog entry is actually to Indeed’s “Job Trends” page (Note to reader: this page has since been removed), where they display a map providing statistics on job postings per capita for the 50 most populous metropolitan areas in the United States. You will find this very revealing. For instance, New York City averages only 7.5 postings per capita, versus Washington D.C’s 20, San Jose’s 22.1, and Boston’s 24!

Executives in career transition may want to take the data presented into consideration when determining how to geographically target their employment search campaigns. In any case, when sending your executive resume to that recruiter in Houston, New York, Boston, Atlanta, or any major city, you’ll have something upon which to base your expectations.

Meanwhile, I am encouraging my executive resume writing clients to give the Indeed.com search engine a try. I like it, and I think you will, too.