Revenues for the online recruitment vertical have grown at an average rate of 14.6% over the past five years, according to the research firm IbisWorld. And the momentum isn’t expected to stop: The industry made $4.4 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to rake in $6.4 billion in 2022 according to the same business intelligence company.

Unemployment is near record lows, leaving companies struggling to find the right talent. Wages are also finally increasing which is making it difficult to lure people away from current jobs. Considering this, the job boards are in sweet spot right now; however, the market is getting crowded by new entrants trying to get a piece of pie. This essentially means job boards need to concentrate on getting high quality job listings in order to cater to the rising demand.

In this post we’ll cover some of the compelling insights that we unveiled by analyzing the job data feed delivered by JobsPikr — a platform to access fresh job posts from company sites and job boards.

Dataset

This dataset is comprised of data extracted from some of the popular US-based job boards such as CareerBuilder, Dice, Monster and Indeed. The total record count was more than 150,000 for the job postings crawled in the last 30 days. Given below are the data fields:

Crawl timestamp

Job category

City

Company name

Company description

Contact person email

Contact person phone number

Job board name

Job description

Job requirement

Job title

Job type

Post date

Salary

State

Note that all the job boards won’t have above-mentioned data fields — it varies depending on the portal.

Exploratory analyses

We’ll perform exploratory analyses on the vital data fields to understand the present state of the job market. Then, we’ll move to text mining of job requirements and descriptions.

Top job categories

Given below is the chart depicting the top job categories — we can see that ‘sales’, ‘engineering’, ‘marketing’ have captured the top three spots.

Top locations in terms of job postings

Here we’ll uncover the top 10 locations in the United States with most number of job openings. The chart shows that ‘Atlanta’, ‘San Francisco’ and ‘New York City’ feature as the top three cities in this case.

Top companies with job listings

Let’s now find out the companies that have listed job openings. We can see that the leading recruitment and employment agencies like ‘CyberCoders’, ‘Robert Half’, ‘REED’ and ‘Hays’ have captured a major share. Deloitte as a service network company has got the third spot.

Top job titles

Let’s now analyse the job titles to figure the most in-demand positions. We can see can that cumulatively there is substantial demand for managerial positions cutting across all other job roles. Other than that engineering and development related roles have significant openings. Next up are the sales and consulting roles. The chart also shows that ‘Java’ and ‘SAP’ related job titles are in demand as well.

Salary range

The predominant salary range falls in between $80k to $120k. Other salary ranges that are more than 300k and go up to $500k are outliers.

Job type

We can see that majority of the job openings are on ‘full time’ basis and ‘temporary’ jobs are least in number.

Text mining

Now we’ll perform text mining techniques to on the job description and job requirements fields to understand the top terms used to describe the job and the associated skills.

Top terms in job description

Let’s find out the most frequently used words in the job description using the word cloud given below:

We can see that ‘Experience’ is the most frequently used word in job description. Other words with higher frequency are ‘work’, ‘years’, ‘team’, ‘skills’.

Top skills

Now let’s uncover the most in-demand skills by going through the job requirements posted in the job listings. Here is the word cloud created using the frequency of occurrence of the term.

Clearly degree, diploma and certification are most common and predominant elements in the job requirements in terms of education. Further analyses of the word frequency reveals the following top 10 skills:

SQL

Java

Security

Data

Excel

HTML

Systems

JavaScript

Agile

C

It is quite evident that older technologies like Java and C are still in demand. Apart from that, skills around data analysis and security are also sought after.

Conclusion

In this study, we analyzed the clean job feeds delivered by JobsPikr to understand the current US job market. Apart from exploratory analyses, other advanced techniques such as topic modeling can also be applied for better job matching in job boards.

Let us know in the comments section if you would like to uncover any additional insight.