Mapping It Out Across North America

Summer can often be a good time for hiring with so many new college graduates on the job hunt. According to a recent job report, the unemployment rate in the United States is 4.3 percent, the lowest it has been since March 2001. There are jobs out there and people willing to work. But if you’re looking for a job in a specific field or industry, where is the best location to look?

At CapRelo, we wanted to take a look at some of the job opportunity hotspots throughout North America. As a global relocation company, we are always interested in the business landscape as a whole, what the best cities are for jobs, and who is hiring the most. So, we decided to look at the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the United States as well as the top five areas in Canada and Mexico in order to find out what industry has the most open jobs. To do this, we used data from LinkedIn (taken the first week of June) to look at job listings for each metropolitan area and then put together a map of our findings.





Overall, we were surprised by some of the results while other results were to be expected. For instance, it was not shocking to see that New York was the best city for jobs in 2017, with the most total open jobs, but specifically the highest number of financial jobs. It also made sense that Los Angeles is hiring in large numbers for construction. The city has a number of development projects going on, including in the downtown area where the LA Times says there hasn’t been that much construction since the 1920s.

One of the most surprising results was that Washington, D.C. was hiring the most information technology jobs in the country, ahead of markets like San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin. San Francisco and Seattle were numbers two and three, respectively, but Washington had thousands more open positions. Boston was another interesting result. Healthcare is their top hiring industry with just over 23,000 open positions. Digging a little deeper, healthcare jobs have been steadily rising since June 2016, adding about 20,000 jobs. Internationally, IT jobs were most in demand. It was the top industry in all five metropolitan areas in Canada, as well as Mexico City.

The business landscape is always shifting and those shifts have a variety of impacts on different cities and different regions. Currently, plenty of companies are hiring and unemployment is a level not seen in years. At CapRelo, we wanted to see which industries had a large number of open jobs in some of the largest metropolitan areas in North America, and present our readers with a list of the best cities for jobs and opportunities. Some results were surprising while some were not. However, taking a step back and looking at the overall hiring landscape helps give perspective to both employers and job seekers.







