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.  | 
|||
                