Each year, the US holiday season is preceded by a boost in hiring among retailers and package shippers. Considering the changing state of the job market, we wondered how this year’s holiday hiring season compared to last year’s.
Below are rankings of the top holiday keywords and companies in October 2009 and the changes since a year ago. Against a backdrop of overall hiring decline, rising keywords include Sales Associate, Cosmetics and Stock Room.
We hope this information will help you focus on holiday opportunities that are still showing promise. If you’re looking for holiday-related work this season, explore the links above and try other keywords with our Job Trends. Also, don’t forget to use our Salary Search to prepare for your interviews.
As companies look to Indeed sponsored jobs as a cost-effective way to promote their jobs and get quality hires, they often ask us how to track the ROI of Indeed and their recruitment advertising investments.
To help companies effectively track results and make the most of their budgets, we published “The Four A’s of Recruitment Advertising” (PDF) - a free white paper that goes step by step through the process of tracking candidate source and measuring your results, with best practices and checklists for each of the four A’s:
Assign
Automate
Analyze
Adjust
Download the white paper to find out more and learn how to use the four A’s in your own recruitment advertising efforts.
Providing the best job search experience increasingly means providing the best mobile job search experience. So we’re pleased that our iPhone app, Job Search, is the #1 business application in the App Store! Job Search is the most popular application for the iPhone and iPod Touch to find jobs, and it’s free.
Based on feedback we’ve received, we’ve made it even easier to find what every job seeker wants: new job postings. Recent searches show the number of jobs added since your last visit. Just tap on a recent search, or tap the “new” button on our search results page to see the jobs added since the last time you checked.
We’ll continue improving our iPhone application and mobile websites so you can find a great job whether you’re sitting at a desk or sitting on the bus. We keep an eye on our comments and ratings in the App Store so let us know how we’re doing. If you don’t already have our application, download Job Search or tell a friend about it. Indeed also provides mobile job search for Blackberry and other mobile users.
We’ve just released a Job Market Competition index, which compares the number of unemployed to the number of job postings in the biggest 50 cities in the US. The more unemployed there are per job opening, the more competition there is in the job market and the harder it is to find a job.
Washington DC has by far the least competition for jobs and so is relatively better for the unemployed, with a whopping six job openings for every unemployed person. Federal government stimulus is clearly working for DC, but is it working in the rest of the country? Apparently not for Detroit, at the opposite end of the scale, with an atrocious 18 unemployed for every job opening.
See our ranking of all 50 cities which also shows how each city’s rank has changed since the previous month. Relatedly, our Job Postings per Capita map compares the number of job postings with the total population of these cities.
We’ll be updating the Job Market Competition index monthly, so you can track which parts of the country give you the best chance of finding a job.
We often hear from clients that sponsoring jobs on Indeed is an easy way to promote all their jobs at once:
Indeed was the only model where we could get visibility for all jobs while only paying for performance. Intermountain Healthcare
With Indeed, there’s not a lot of hands-on work involved - the candidates just come. You push a button, set the budget and it’s done. Pitney Bowes
This got us thinking - why not show how pay-per-click recruitment advertising on Indeed works, and how easy it is for a company to sponsor its jobs? The video below provides an overview and how to get started:
