The unemployment rate in the U.S. was still 9.4 percent in July, but some cities are better than others to look for a job. Of the top 50 metro areas, Washington, D.C., is the easiest for unemployed workers to find a job, while Detroit is the hardest, according to a new Job Market Competition index put together by job search engine Indeed.
The index ranks cities based on how many unemployed people there are compared to job listings. For every one unemployed person in Washington, D.C., for example, there are six job postings. Whereas in Detroit, there is only one job posting for every 18 unemployed people. The higher the ratio of job postings to unemployed, the more chances there are of landing a job.
The top ten cities in the index for finding jobs (and their corresponding ratios of job postings to unemployed) are:
- Washington, DC (6:1)
- Jacksonville, FL (3:1)
- Baltimore, MD (1:1)
- Salt Lake City, UT (1:2)
- New York, NY (1:2)
- San Jose, CA (1:2)
- Hartford, CT (1:2)
- Oklahoma City, OK (1:3)
- Austin, TX (1:3)
- Boston, MA (1:3)
The worst ten cities for job searches are:
- 41. Buffalo, NY (1:6)
42. Orlando, FL (1:6)
43. Sacramento, CA (1:6)
44. Rochester, NY (1:6)
45. Chicago, IL (1:7)
46. Portland, OR (1:7)
47. Los Angeles, CA (1:8)
48. Riverside, CA (1:9)
49. Miami, FL (1:10)
50. Detroit, MI (1:18)
Wait this article didn’t mention Twitter or Facebook?
what’s twitter?
Does this scare the hell out of anyone else who is afraid of Obama’s big huge fat government?? That’s what I see when I read this.. Why else would DC be so high?
Socialism here we come….
Umm, where did you pull that from?
Easy to find a job in Washington + Obamas Government = Socialism?
G0d I wish everyone that used word “socialism” actually had a clue of what it’s meaning really is instead of reciting the same 3 talking points that they heard on Fox News.
While I didn’t think the word “Socialism” – I did think of big (HUGE) government when I saw that. . . and I would have thought the same if Santa Claus were president.
I woudn’t be surprised if those DC jobs are private sector, lobbyists, ngos etc. Lobbying budgets are up AFAIK
still symptomatic of “Big Government” . . . lobbyists are a tiny step up from lawyers. . .or maybe that’s a step down. . . aw hell, they’re all the same.
As a resident of the DC area, I’ll give you a little bit of information. The huge expansion in government jobs in DC happened in the 90’s, into the early 2000’s. About half of these jobs are in the Military/Defense sector, which was vastly expanded under Obama’s predecessor. If you want to find bloated, overpaid, know nothing government employees, check out the job postings/pay rates for Top Secret and Secret clearance holding database admins. $100,000/year for a TS clearance person to run Access reports. These are all in the military sector, something that “big government hating” conservatives like yourself have expanded by voting in knee jerk reactionary morons like Bush.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at any job site. It’s almost all military related.
Only a gigantic doucebag would take a jobs report and turn it into fears of “Socialism”, like its some giant Scandianavian boogeyman that’s going to come out of the ocean and smother me with Ikea furniture, hot blonde women, and high quality of life. When I get sent down to Alabama on business, I see a state full of ugly fat asses, with the occasional normal person. It’s also the most conservative state in the country. I think there’s a connection there.
When you put it that way, socialism sounds AWESOME.
Thank you for pointing out the truth to all the morons out there.
Dude, thank you for that! I’m so glad someone said it. I’m tired of all there crazy ass idiots repeating crap FOX News says, without really understanding what they are saying.
I’m tired of all there crazy ass idiots repeating crap MSDNC says, without really understanding what they are saying.
In 1990, the DoD’s budget was 300 billion dollars. In 2001, it was 291.1 billion dollars. In other words, if as you say the amount of government jobs in DC increased substantially in the 1990s because of defense spending, then you’re pretty much knocking away your argument that those jobs pay so well (unless you think that previously they paid even better)
We don’t need a jobs report to instill fears of socialism, you belligerent, elitist jack off.
If you think comparing socialist policies in Sweden is at all relevant to the condition in the U.S. you have your head so far up your Prius’ tailpipe you’ll be picking toxic hybrid battery chemicals out of your stool for the next 20 years.
It’s a simple math problem. When you have the entire bottom half of the population no longer paying taxes, the numbers just don’t work out. There are more people in Los Angeles than there are in Sweden, so the comparison is moronic, though I’m sure your kickball team buddies will all pat you on the back for your clever little retort there.
Add to that the single biggest flat out robbery of the American Tax Payer in history in the guise of stimulus checks and bailouts and buyer incentives and corporate take-overs and bankruptcies, all draped by higher unemployment and higher and newer taxes on the country’s top earners to pay for it all… then yes, you should scream socialism as loudly as you can.
I just hope one of these days the mercury-laden fluorescent bulb will turn on in your environmentalist liberal zombie head — as well as the blind, chest-pounding conservative zealots — and you/we all realize we are doomed without an INDEPENDENT PARTY and TERM LIMITS IN CONGRESS!!!!
And stop saying “douche bag”. It was overused already like 3 years ago. Time for a new word.
And your precious, bumbling liberal Congress is filled with some of the most ugly, overweight, vile, and disgusting souls our country has to offer.
Guess what? It was easy to find a job in DC during the Bush administration too. I lived in DC from 1997 to 2007. It has always been easy to find a job there, and probably always will be. They aren’t all government jobs either. In fact, most jobs aren’t. There are plenty of private companies headquartered (or with large offices) in the DC Metro area. A lot of the jobs are with private companies who do work for the government – especially defense contractors (who did very well under the Bush administration thanks to the Iraq War debacle that was designed to provide cash cows to defense contractors). There are also plenty of non profits and other groups with headquarters in DC. Many of these jobs have high turnover since they attract people who just want to work in DC for a few years before moving on.
Salaries are also higher than average in DC, and you need a high salary if you want to have any hope of affording the cost of owning (or even just renting) real estate there.
Great reply! People keep harping on these mythical Govt jobs in Dc. The scam is, government workers generally only hire other govt workers. If you have no experience working for the government it’s a pretty “small” and “closed” community. Most hiring managers are too impotent or scared to risk hiring someone from outside the govt for positions because they think the Govt culture is “so different than anything else in the world.” This may shock some people but DC is very much a “Good Ole boy Network,” and you are right a large percentage of the “new” Govt job market is almost All Defense related contracts.
Not to mention the whole matter that 90 % of the govt jobs in DC require some sort of security clearance which you can’t get unless you have a government jobs. Very few employers and agencies will sponsor someone for a clearance because the Govt charges over $5,000 for contracting agencies to get their consultants.
don’t be fatuous, use the dictionary if you have too
Obama’s big fat Government?
Check your facts people, Bush JR was the one to expand government to it’s largest size in history. You know, the same president to give the banks their bailout money? Two wars? Any of this ringing a bell??
It should I just got my job through Twitter; thankfully I live in Baltimore. Always tons of jobs sent using @Baltimore_jobs . I wonder who runs those twitter accounts no doubt bringing traffic to it’s affiliates! At least someone is making money off of Twitter!
Finally… something about twitter!!! And I thought I was just waiting my time.
This is only a useful post if you include information on (a) what kind of a job (IT Manager, McDonalds)? (b) How much are you paid?
If you’re getting $250,000/year jobs on twitter, that’s interesting. If you’re landing $40,000/year jobs on twitter, that’s not so interesting.
Unemployed people are unlikely to shop at Whole Foods. So go ahead and deny them health care.
Too expensive… Wal-mart. Where the uninsured buy from the uninsured.
Well, at least the stimulus package is working in one city.
+1
God help you if you’re not a veteran. Veterans get substantial preference in federal jobs to the degree that your resume won’t even be looked at for many GS 5-7 positions.
Screenshot of a rejection email I was sent below. (Received dozens of similar emails over the last few months.)
http://bit.ly/SnI6G
as it should be Rian! Veterans deserve that and much more!!
Real veterans do. My wife’s friend joined the Air Force, got knocked up 3 months out of boot camp, left the AF with an honorable discharge, and is now classified a veteran, with full benefits. Free medical care, preferential hiring(she has zero skills/education, yet has been hired for an IT job), and gov’t loans for veterans.
I think these benefits are too much, and should be reserved for combat veterans and people in the service for several years or more. Not idiots that join because they were in the bottom 10% of their high school class and didn’t know what else to do.
Me bets you’re all gungho about going to war, but never enlisted yourself?
And this is how I know, you wrote:
“Not idiots that join because they were in the bottom 10% of their high school class and didn’t know what else to do.”
You don’t sound to bright yourself.
Guess who recruiters go after: vulnerable people with limited to no choices.
And if you had served with them you wouldn’t be calling them idiots.
“Free medical care, preferential hiring(she has zero skills/education, yet has been hired for an IT job), and gov’t loans…”
Sounds like Socialism??????
Funny, I’ve always thought that “best person for the job” worked better than any artificial preference system. If it’s a tossup between two people, and one is a vet, sure. But otherwise…
Best comment I’ve read in ages.
Yeah, that stimulus package worked as well as the Bush tax cuts.
I have an unemployeed republican friend in DC that would beg to differ.
Also as someone who just hired a couple full timers I would say 4 in 10 that apply for jobs are idiots with little skill… So that should really help the unemployeed skilled people be more 1:1
I live in DC. Anecdotally, the results of the study seem pretty accurate for this area. I know Northern Virginia’s unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the country (many people who work in DC live on NoVA).
Go LA!
Go Salt Lake City!
From Capitalism to Socialism – big Government with no plan to reduce the deficit – keep those printing presses humming…..
omg
techcruch did not talk about either google
twitter or fakebook.com something must be broken
+1. TechCrunch.com has quickly become a joke, in my opinion. Very little news outside of anything to do with Social Networking, Apple and the iPhone, or Google and its imminent world dominance. At least MobileCrunch is still halfway decent. Even still, I only come here when I want to see Siegler act like a child in the comment sections of his posts.
Good thing your opinion doesn’t matter and they are in charge of the most popular Technology blog on the web and not you. Try reading one of the 30 other posts they do a day and I think you will see they cover quite a bit. Get off your high horse and think about adding some value before opening your mouth.
A saw an unemployed “Little Mermaid” updating her LinkedIn profile on her iPhone near the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. And she told me things were so bad in Orlando, Wall-E had to cancel his ISP, Tinkerbell is working as a flight attendant with JetBlue and Winnie-The-Pooh is selling Amwaydoor to door…near Universal Studios.
And you don’t want to know where is Sleeping Beauty getting all those $1 bills…you really don’t…
I think Banglore is still much safer and a better city as compared to New york and salt lake to work during this time of recession among all Asian cities
? people being laid off, 20-30% salary cuts, wag hires very low or outright hiring freezes… this is the Bangalore I know.
Bangalore is a better city compared to NY and SL among all ASIAN CITIES? Huh?
Washington, DC: government
Jacksonville, FL : retired people still spending
Portland surprises me. Sacramento, however, does not.
You obviously don’t live in Portland. We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and I’ve been looking for work for over a year.
It’s so bad here that I’m moving out of the state at the end of the month. Not my first choice, but there are no other options here.
what this article doesn’t tell you about washington, dc is that all jobs there are government, and most techcrunch readers would go crazy trying to put up with those jobs.
I have two words: General Motors
I really have to wonder if this takes into account that most people with DC jobs don’t live in DC, but commute in from Maryland and Virginia. 6:1 seems to be a bit extreme to me.
And things like the fact that “Los Angeles” goes about about 50 different city, town, and district names in ads. To a lesser extent other large cities would too…
i cant believe these stats for jobs to no jobs ratio its reall remarkable how many people are unemplyed
Speaking as someone who lives in the DC area, I think two things probably make the number a little out of whack.
First, the population of DC is pretty low compared to the number of people that work there. Many employees in DC are Maryland and Virginia residents.
Second, many of the jobs in DC and the surrounding areas require a security clearance. So, the average unemployed person cannot get one of those jobs; they need to go through the clearance process which if you’re lucky takes about 18 months.
That said, we’re hiring…
Have any need for an accountant?
What would be more useful would be to know how much of a mismatch there is between the jobs being advertised and the skillsets being offered.
That’ll tell a body a lot about where to direct their retraining efforts.
This stats are useless without distinguish between job categories. The fact that there is an high % of un-employment doesn’t mean you won’t find a job easily.
I agree. I would like to see something with job category breakdown.
Excellent point Davide. In cities like Detroit, I’d guess that many those 18 unemployed workers come from the auto industry, whereas the 1 opening could be for a health care worker.
The high-level numbers tell a story but not the whole story.
You have to be on drugs to think Detroit isn’t as bad as this diagram. Being a college graduate in computer science myself, I have yet to find any open jobs for my industry (full time) NONE! Hell, I know for a fact for every job position that opens up, there’s about 500 applications sent in.
It’s really bad in Michigan, Just sell us to Canada and be done with it.
Detroit????
My sister in law owns a ‘training’ company. She trains ‘executives’ (you know – those ‘feel good about me’ classes). SHe had an orgasm, I swear, when Obama was elected. She has 4 solid years of overpaid-for classes she is teaching now (thanks, taxpayers!). It makes me ill, to be honest. The only training I get is the classes I take on my own dime. Too bad Washington thinks YOUR dime is THEIR dime.
Portland is interesting in that its population is much smaller than many of the larger cities on the list.
It is sandwiched btwn Seattle and the bay area which means capital and opportunities are siphoned off. The job situation in Portland has always been a problem but the recent recession has hit the construction industry ana timber products quite hard. Therefore places like riverside and Portland and los angeles and Sacramento have all been disproportionately effected.
Why should this be surprising to anyone? It takes a lot of people to disburse a $3.6 TRILLION budget. http://bit.ly/13krZK. That money doesn’t spend itself, kids!
try Moscow, Idaho, with 2 universities near by, there’s no jobs…nothing worth “career” noting
Somebody organize flight charters from Detroit to DC, please.
All those surveys just distort the picture. There is a magnitude of factors not captured by any data.
Let me be more specific about Boston. For several decades middle class families couldn’t afford to live in Boston itself. So perhaps 80% of people who work in Boston don’t actually live there but in the surrounding townships and bedroom communities. It became so bad that city wanted to compel the municipal workers to have a Boston address. You can see how that would totally distort the data on the unemployed in Boston itself.
As a born-and-raised Washingtonian, I agree with most of what’s been said about the DC labor market. It’s not just military, however, and it’s not just from the 1990’s/ Bush era. It’s mainly because the DC labor market (which probably includes Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland in this study) is basically counter-cyclical to the rest of the nation’s economy. Whenever there’s a recession, the labor market out-performs the rest of the coutnry because of the Keynesian approach to getting out of a recession – spending our way out of it. New initiatives are started which employ management consultants, IT specialists, NGOs, public policy administrators, PhD’s, etc. They may work all over the nation as contractors or public employees, but their income taxes are paid locally. Don’t worry, when the economy bounces back, it all falls back in line.
Lovely! I just happen to be searching in 6,15,36, and 43. No wonder I’m getting garbage back in my hand…
I live in the Portland, OR area and this report is so completely incomplete. It doesn’t take into account industries or what types of jobs are available. For example, every job I apply for has 100-500 people applying for it…not 7. As I search through the job listings on the various sites, there are several for replacement window canvasers, administrative assistants, office specialists, etc. Even among IT jobs, they want specialized knowledge that I’ve not had the opportunity to learn, and it’s amazing to see “entry level” jobs that require 5 years of experience and/or a Masters degree.
It would be really great if I only had to complete against 7 other people for any job, but the job listings actually say that they expect to receive so many applications that they will not be able to verify if any specific applications were received.
anything like this for canada?
I think it will take another 2 yrs before we will see more job listing on National Level. in California, i’m not sure how long it will take before we will see the state in a productive level..
Nat
http://www.loopcity.net/
Wikimedia mobile is currently run out of Jacksonville, FL. We have lots of jobs here with lots of my friends companies. Its funny to see it rank so high though!
As a resident of Jacksonville, I laugh at being ranked so high. A lot of those jobs are franchise opportunities (got money?), commission only jobs (know others that got money? What are these benefits you keep talking about?), and the military is (usually) always hiring.
What’s scary is Detroit. That says something there. And Miami isn’t THAT far from here.
I can’t believe Dayton, Ohio isn’t on this list (where I live). It’s easily in the top 10 dying cities with the least jobs.
Portland is so bad… and yet I just waded through 70 resumes that were all terrible. I think there must be a huge amount of somewhat-skilled workers here. ALL the really good resumes were people applying from other states.
It makes sense, I suppose, since so many people have been moving to PDX for the lifestyle, not their profession.
Nice list but I guess people don’t care about 16-35?
There is a link to the full report on Indeed.com.
I live in the Chicago area and I am not surprised by their ranking. I have had little luck in my search here, but have had much more interest from smaller markets. My neighbor was also unemployed and his wife who had not worked for a number of years started looking too. So, I think the competition is even higher than just those classified as unemployed. It’s brutal. I have been travelling to Cincinnati for a temporary project and it is much better there. Everyone still needs the products that P&G and Kroger make/market. Being open to relocation is probably the best way to find something… although it hasn’t worked for me yet…
Job postings are a useless statistic for anyone looking for a job. They more often than not exist for the purpose of ‘jumping through the required hoops before we give the job to the person we’ve already selected’.
wow detroit at number 50 is almost twice as bad as miami at 49. i was born and raised in the d. it truly is a third world sh*thole and is only getting worse.
Nice survey for research..
So umm because DC has so many government people that have such great jobs would Obama mind sending some of them over here to Afghanistan . Oh that’s right he takes a 16 hour flight to get the Olympic’s in Chicago but when my General writes a letter saying we need help he can’t make the 19 hour flight to save my three battle buddies that got killed last week. We need people here troops are dying and when we leave this country will fail. An Afghanistan doctor is cutting soldiers hair for 2 dollars a hair cut. That’s right were Americans we only care about our country. Afghanistan is way worst then the US and they need us to protect them but god forbid our own president who cares more about a sport then troops. Got to love self centered Americans who are just luck they where born in America. Maybe in the next life you wont be so lucky and your mother will be strapping a bomb on you that way you don’t have to worry about a job.