Help Wanted

By David Bernstein

Although Chicago's unemployment rate recently fell to 5.4 percent from 6.6 percent a year ago, it is still higher than those of the nation's other largest cities. The good news is that the job market here is heating up-at least if you're counting Internet job listings. "There are more online job postings in Chicago now than there have been in the last three and a half years," says Bob Plummer, an analyst at Corzen, a market research company that tracks hundreds of recruitment Web sites and online job boards, including the Big Three sites: Yahoo HotJobs, CareerBuilder, and Monster. In fact, local job listings on those sites jumped to 39,890 in April, up 26 percent from a year ago. Still, as Plummer notes, compared with other places, Chicago's job market could benefit from even more heat.

Number of Internet Job Postings, April 2006 (per metro area)
Computer/Math		Architecture/Engineering
Washington, D.C.	11,057	Los Angeles	5,072
New York	10,343	Washington, D.C.	4,294
Los Angeles	9,040	New York	2,547
Chicago	6,641	Boston	2,416
Boston	5,580	Chicago	2,196
Business/Finance		Health Care
New York	32,721	Los Angeles	11,781
Los Angeles	26,942	New York	5,875
Washington, D.C.	18,365	Washington, D.C.	4,388
Chicago	18,026	Chicago	3,896
Boston	10,618	Boston	3,708
Source: Corzen, Inc.