In my previous post, I noted that despite the large decline in total number of job postings, the number Hadoop/MapReduce job postings increased by 49%. What is the current state of the online job market? The financial crisis that began in the Fall of 2008 has had a lasting negative effect on the U.S. online job market. Since late 2008, there have been significantly less jobs posted online.
Using data from SimplyHired† and a few charts, I’ll quickly highlight the impact of the global economic crisis on the U.S. online job market. To quantify the sudden drop in U.S. online job postings, I calculated the average number of job posts per day:
The number of posts declined 49% from Jan/May 2008 to Jan/May 2009. While there has been a downward trend since April 2008, the financial crisis in September 2008 marked the start of even larger reductions. In particular, the relatively small number of job postings in Nov/Dec 2008 has carried over into the first five months of 2009. The sharp seasonal rebound that occurs in Jan/Feb of each year, was practically non-existent in 2009. While some forecasters are seeing signs of a recovery, at least through the first five months of 2009, we haven’t detected “green shoots” in the U.S. online job market.
Looking at job postings by location, the Top 20 states (in terms of # of postings from Jan/May 2009), suffered losses ranging from 38% (MD,VA) to 58% (MN) fewer postings per day:
Declines weren’t confined to states with large numbers of job postings, or certain regions of the country. Every state suffered large drops: the “best-performing” state (OK) saw a 36% decline in number of job postings per day.
(†) In partnership with SimplyHired and Greenplum, we maintain a data warehouse that contains most U.S. online job postings dating back to mid-2005.