Dice shows a 45% drop in jobs advertised on their site. There's a very good chance some companies are simply moving their job postings elsewhere or cutting down the number of sites they advertise on in order to reduce costs, or perhaps decrease the flood of resumes.
Not only that it's important to remember that a lot of people are being shifted around.
For example, Microsoft regularly had hundreds of job openings before the downturn. So if they make cuts now the cut employees are going to take those other open jobs. That gives you a massive drop in listings from Microsoft even though no one actually became unemployed.
I mean, there are clearly fewer jobs out there and I'm not saying things aren't bad. I'm just saying a drop in listings probably isn't the best indicator of how bad.
I don't see the difference. If Microsoft fires and rehires 200 employees, and therefore hires 200 less from outside, how is that different from Microsoft not firing anyone and hiring 200 less from outside?
If Dice is reporting a 45% drop in postings, then the actual drop in available jobs might be even much steeper. At least in the Cleveland market, headhunters are all sniffing around for any scrap they can find. While it used to be that every job would have 4-ish headhunters advertising for it, that number is now somewhere around ten. Note that my rough analysis is based on the commonality of obscure phrases or skill sets ("Python is a Big Plus"). I don't mean that Python is obscure, but that unique wording shared among postings (especially in Cleveland) lets me know that it's probably the same job with a headhunter doing a cut & paste into his own description. That companies are adopting standardized vendor managements systems where job requirements are presented to all qualified (gone through proper procedure) headhunters only adds to the redundancy. It used to be that a hiring manager would simply call up his favorites and circumvent the other eighteen firms who have an established contract with the company.
I'm sure part of it has to do with the signal to noise problem Dice has had for the past few years.
I had a job listing there earlier this year and got ZERO good applicants out of around 30 responses.
I posted the same thing on Craigslist (which cost me 25 bucks instead of 800 bucks) and I got over fifty applicants that had actually read the listing and appeared qualified (out of around 130 responses).
I'm launching a site next week for Internet-related job listings in the SF Bay Area for just this reason. The bigger sites annoyed me both as an employer and as a job seeker for the reasons you mention. I reached out directly to friends and HR folks at local companies and have a pretty good number of listings to start. Hopefully this will be a bit more targeted. I'll post to Ask HN for feedback, post-launch.
Good point. There's been an increasing awareness of the ineffectiveness of the bigger job boards, of which Dice is certainly one, over the past year or so thanks to people like Nick Crocodilo. This may be as much or more a reflection of a long-term downward trend in postings on Dice and Monster, versus on smaller, more targeted job boards or more local ones like Craigslist. In their shortsighted attempt to feed on the fear and insecurity of their target audience regarding the economy and the job market, I would not be surprised if Techcruch has missed the opportunity to write about the more interesting but less obvious story behind the headline. Nor should I be surprised given the editorial style and attention-hungry focus of Techcrunch. Such a mindset tends not to produce a lot of thoughtful analysis for fear of losing the mass audience.
I think the actual drop is smaller than 45%. A lot of the job postings on Dice are by recruiters. More often, different recruiters post for the same positions. So let's say there are 100 jobs less posted compared to last year. It's likely that the actual # of positions is just 50 or even less.
In addition to that, I know that, at least in the Bay Area, there has been a consolidation among smaller recruiting firms. That may contribute to the decrease in job postings.
Recruiters are often the first victims in a downturn. So I would say the effect would be even more pronounced. Besides consolidation among smaller firms and layoffs of in-house recruiters, many independent recruiters have moved away from recruiting temporarily and may or may not return when the climate changes. This happened in the early 2000s also. The net effect is a dramatic drop in duplicated job postings on the major job boards which, to an outsider or a Techcrunch writer, is interpreted as a dramatic slump in tech hiring. As usual, statistics are easy to misinterpret depending on how willing you are to look beneath the surface.
If they work in IT they have a much better chance of finding a job than anyone else does right now - because of the long-term trend of labor shortages in IT.
On the employer side, honestly, I don't think we're big enough for our data to be statistically significant. I can say that we've had another record month of traffic & applications.
Despite all the doom and gloom, people are hiring.
