tl;dr: apply for work in counties with a huge supply of openings and not enough people to fill them. See this real-time visual for the best counties.

Okay, so you need a job and you’re able to move anywhere in the country. Naturally, you apply to jobs in the hip, high-population cities like LA or New York. That’s where all the opportunities are, right? Yeah, that’s the same mistake I made.

A few months ago I decided to try a little experiment. I threw together a haphazardly crafted cover letter with a generic version of my resume and sent it to a company in Minneapolis I wasn’t interested in. The next morning, as expected, I had already received a response with an invitation to pursue not one, but two jobs. That was in stark contrast to my experience in Austin where I carefully customized my resume for each position and spent hours drafting cover letters, all to no avail.

How did I know that I was going to have better results in Minneapolis? Because I looked at the hard numbers. By applying to a job in a county that had many openings, few people unemployed, and a shrinking labor force, I tipped the odds of landing the job in my favor.

Market Forces

What led me to this conclusion was simple economics. Any market will occasionally face imbalances. In 2005, the housing market was a sellers’ market because there was huge demand for houses with limited supply, so sellers were in control. Similarly at the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, it was a buyers’ market. Whoever had cash on hand to invest in financial assets, houses, property, etc. was king. Everyone else was trying to get rid of assets and buyers could name their own price.

When it comes to employment, most people would generally assume that the labor market favors corporations. After all, job openings tend to have tens (or even hundreds) of applicants. Corporations can pick and choose the best employees from this pool while applicants have to take what they can get.

Turning the Tables

But what if you look at this scenario from the opposite perspective? Could there be regions where the economy is robust enough that the number of job openings is much greater than the number of unemployed people currently residing there? If you can identify these areas, then hopefully you’ve identified the regions where companies will beg qualified candidates to fill a position rather than the other way around.

Data to the Rescue

It turns out that data exists that can give you a relatively accurate idea of such regions. Begin with a list of labor force and unemployment statistics of the 3,000+ US counties, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Then superimpose job openings data from Indeed.com and package the analysis into a Microsoft Power BI dashboard. Now you can identify the counties with the highest ratio of job openings to unemployed residents:

Finding the Counties with High Supply of Jobs and Low Demand

Intuitively it makes sense to focus your search in counties where there is a surplus of openings, those where companies (hopefully) have to compete to get their positions filled. The dashboard makes it really easy to narrow down the list of counties to include only those whose openings to unemployed ratio is higher than that of 95% of other counties.

Note that Boston, Washington DC, and Salt Lake City are the brightest green, indicating the highest proportion of job openings to unemployed workers.

On the visual above, you might see some cities you’re interested in. As I browsed the map I saw that Travis County, TX (Austin) is in the top 5%. “Cool!” I thought. I like Austin, and the data indicates that it may be easier to get a job there. I applied to several jobs in the area but I didn’t have luck, all my applications seemed to get lost in the fray.

It turns out that 157 other people per day (57,000/year) also think the Austin region is cool, and they’re all applying for jobs and moving there. Sadly Openings:Unemployed is not the only factor in job competition. The other important factor is whether people from outside the county are applying and are therefore inflating the labor pool.

Refining the Algorithm

If you want to have the most control of the job search process, the best place to apply for a job would be a county with lots of openings, few people unemployed, and where people are not moving to like crazy and filling up all the openings. Makes sense, right? I factored these variables into a single calculation that I called the “Job Find Index.” It weights each county’s percentile ranking for Openings:Unemployed (55%), Labor Force Growth Rate (15%), Unemployment Rate (15%), Labor Force Size (10%), and percentage of jobs in my area of expertise (5%).

When I first ran this analysis back in February, 2017, the best county was Hennepin County, MN (Minneapolis), the brightest green circle in the screenshot below. Armed with this information I had reached the moment of truth: if I apply to a random job that I was remotely qualified for, would I get a response merely because there aren’t enough other candidates?

Applying for the Job

To test my theory, I did a search on Indeed.com and specifically reviewed the top search results looking for a job I didn’t want to get (the company was in a field I wasn’t interested in). I found one that fit the bill and submitted my resume to the firm at 5pm on a Sunday. When I woke up the next morning, I checked my inbox and found a message that arrived at 8:23am:

Hi Narayana, Thank you for sending in you [sic] resume. I have a couple of positions open that would be a good fit with your background. Are you interested in being local to Minneapolis or hoping to commute/travel? Thanks, M.S.

Now that’s more like it. Instead of jumping through hoops to even get noticed, I got a next-day response from a recruiter who’s suggesting he might have two positions for me! In the end, I let this lead slip because I wasn’t interested in the position to begin with, but it shows that there is some potential to my strategy.

What’s the Takeaway?

In summary, if your life currently offers you some flexibility, you can make your job search process a lot easier by using economic principles to your advantage. Focus your efforts on regions that have a huge supply of jobs and a shrinking pool of applicants. This alone will increase the odds that you’ll get noticed and contacted.

And don’t forget, some of the less popular areas today (which are strong economically) could be tomorrow’s havens. Will Austin be as enticing a city when it’s 110° every day because of global warming? Minneapolis, on the other hand, might become much more attractive!

The Top 5 Counties/Cities for a Job (as of April, 2017)

The dynamic nature of the job market will quickly render the list below obsolete. However, you can see the live interactive dashboard on my web site.