Regional disparities in the U.S. job market have always fascinated me. To pick an obvious example, rural Wisconsin is a great place to be a dairy farmer, but a bleak home for bond traders. In New York City, hiring habits run the other way.
Such "hot spots" and "cold spots" exist even for mainstream jobs with nationwide appeal -- such as nursing, accounting, marketing or property management. Geography still matters, according to a detailed new analysis of 23.4 million U.S. job postings. The study was conducted by TalentWorks, a San Francisco startup that focuses on job-interview matching.
Looking to make it as a lawyer? As the accompanying heat map shows, your best prospects right now are in Washington, D.C. If you've got a nursing degree, TalentWorks finds, your hottest job market is in Colorado Springs, Colo. For software development, the hiring frenzy is most intense in Austin, Texas, and so on.
TalentWorks' analysis focuses on five factors, starting with employers' demand, as measured by the number of job postings for each type of work, sorted by metro areas.
Next in the mix: unmet demand, or the degree to which companies are having a hard time filling openings. As TalentWorks chief executive and cofounder Kushal Chakrabarti explains, "if a company re-posts the same job every week for 6 weeks, you can be pretty sure they couldn't find someone for the first 5 weeks."
Also relevant: the average salary for jobs, making necessary adjustments for local variations. TalentWorks uses a blend of government data, posted salary ranges and its own analytic methods to figure out what parts of the country are paying the most.
Finally, a gauge of how easy or hard it will be for job-hunters to find work in their chosen fields, location by location. These measures, Chakrabarti explains with a smile, are known internally as "delight" and "agony."
With official U.S. unemployment at just 4.5% currently, job-hunters generally should be experiencing more delight than agony. That's especially true, according to TalentWorks' model, for accountants in Seattle, property managers in Minneapolis -- and even customer-service representatives in Phoenix.
