Using resume and job postings to establish job market saturation

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Using resume and job postings to establish job market saturation (4/26/05)

Craigslist now lets folks post their CVs and resumes, within their region. Doing this strikes me as risky because of the sacrifice of one's personal privacy and the threat of losing their current job if their employer were to come across the posting. So the fact folks are doing this indicates their beyond normal market conditions, and could indicate a job market in a certain region is saturated. In other words: there aren't any jobs to be hired for.

With all the regions they have, an idea struck me: if one were to categorize each resume posting by job and add them up, the totals for several markets could be presented at once. Assuming the resume postings are due to saturation, the markets with the lowest resume postings (postings initiated by a person) to job postings (postings initiated by an employer) ratio should be places where one could find a job.

Lets do a spot experiment using the # of Web/HTML/Information Design jobs on May 1, 2005, for the craigslist regions with over 500 resumes posted:

City	Resumes	Job Postings	Ratio
Los Angeles	7	0	1
San Francisco	15	1	0.9375
San Diego	8	1	0.888888889
New York	3	4	0.428571429
Chicago	1	3	0.25
Boston	1	4	0.2
Philadelphia	0	1	0
Seattle	0	3	0
Portland	0	0	0
Washington D.C.	0	0	0

So regions with a ratio above .5 have more job seekers than jobs (market favors employers), whereas regions below .5 have more jobs than job seekers (market favors job seekers). Keep in mind we're only looking at one day so this isn't very accurate (see Portland and Washington D.C.), but if someone were to run this sort of data analysis on an on-going basis over the last month, the information would be very useful to a lot of folks.