Finding Work With LinkedIn Jobs

Have you been searching through LinkedIn for your next position?

You should be – by my quick count, LinkedIn is showing 20,452 open jobs within 50 miles of 58 million Americans.

Back a few years ago, the “jobs offered” function was more of a potential than a reality. But since then, companies have picked up on it, and you’ll be left behind if you don’t take notice.

Jobs

Right there on your LinkedIn home page – “Find Jobs”.

And like all searches on LinkedIn, don’t mess around with the simple version, head right to the advanced tab.

Statistics

So starting from the most important metropolitan area (for me) I discovered 121 jobs within the LinkedIn system – and this has to be some sort of record because while this area is reasonably technical, I hadn’t seen much adoption of LinkedIn for hiring outside a few large firms. Additionally – I noticed that it was a broad base of organizations using the system.

So then I had to check the larger areas – and noted the interesting ZIP Code pattern… Clearly ZIP Codes run from one side of the country to the other, but I had never realized that NYC had 10001, Chicago had 60006 (actually 60606, but the former is right there in Arlington Heights), and LA is out at 90009. Good numbers from each.

And then of course, to ground things in reality I had to check the Valley – and found a nice palindromic ZIP Code for that location…

Yes – that’s a total of 58 million people living in these 5 areas with 20,452 advertised jobs. And since you have to pay LinkedIn to post your job in this section, I’m reasonably confident that most of those jobs actually exist.

Hiring Activity, Technology Bias, and/or LinkedIn Preference

Now I’m not going to try to draw a whole lot out of this – does San Jose really have more than four times as many open positions per capita than these others? Possible, but perhaps not likely. It’s more likely that the companies in San Jose have more experience with LinkedIn, have more open technology positions, and are more likely to use LinkedIn to fill those positions.

I’d use this space to make some sort of joke about LA, but that might come back to bite me when I’m looking for some sort of nomination – I’ll just leave it that the others may have more technical openings…

Don’t get left behind

Other than the vague religious reference that might scare you into taking action, I’d like to suggest that if you are looking for work, and have not already searched through the jobs tab with a focus on your target location and industry, you better do so asap.

And if you’d check back in here afterwords, we’d love to hear your story. It could be as good as Mike’s LinkedIn success story from last year…

To your continued success,

steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock