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Tech Job Postings Are Down 40% On Popular Job Boards (medium.com) 142

Posted by msmash from the what's-happening? dept.
Tech job postings are down 40% year-on-year, says Cameron Moll, founder of job board Authentic Jobs. He says that job volume for April 2016 was nearly half the volume of April 2015, and currently, annual job posting volume is 63% on the platform compared to 2015, and 59% compared to 2014. But wait, there is always a chance that it is only his website that is getting less popular, right? Mr. Moll adds that it's not just his job board, but several of the competitors' as well. From a blog post: On one hand, we're cautious to assume that fewer jobs posted = fewer jobs available. We recognize companies have many avenues for advertising available jobs -- social media, recruiters, employee word-of-mouth, company websites, etc. Companies may choose at any time to broadcast jobs through these channels instead of a job board. So, for all intents and purposes, it's feasible the same number of jobs are available this year compared to previous years, just not on job boards. On the other hand, our volume trends have been very consistent the past four years. However, these trends are suddenly meaningless in 2016. It's anyone's guess what our volume will be each month regardless of what the historical data says.
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Tech Job Postings Are Down 40% On Popular Job Boards More

Tech Job Postings Are Down 40% On Popular Job Boards

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  • Dammit Trump! (Score:4, Funny)

    by CajunArson ( 465943 ) on Saturday July 09, 2016 @03:37PM (#52479231) Journal

    None of this bad stuff would have happened if that Donald Trump hadn't fooled those idiot 'Muricans into voting to leave the EU!

    If there's one thing that's a confirmed fact from reading Slashdot's editorial spin: If you aren't in the EU you might as well kill yourself now because you either live in the utopian paradise of the EU or you live in Somalia and there's literally no shades of gray.

    Just look at the third world hellhole that is Switzerland compared to the economic powerhouse of Greece if you don't believe me!

    • The EU was destined from the start to become a dystopia- it's basically a confederacy that self-sabotaged itself by adopting a common currency, so the economies of individual countries lost the stability that was formerly provided by currency exchange fluctuations.
      When the U.S. was run under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress printed currency but it depreciated so fast that individual states started just printing their own money. There was no such thing as a federal tax system; Congress

      • The EU was destined from the start to become a dystopia- it's basically a confederacy that self-sabotaged itself by adopting a common currency, so the economies of individual countries lost the stability that was formerly provided by currency exchange fluctuations.

        That stability came at the cost of a lack of stability for others. It was destined from the start to fail because the UK didn't adopt the Euro. If Germany had refused the same crap would be happening, but it was the UK.

  • I assume this is focused stateside? The articles doesn't provide much in the way of clues.

  • Posting jobs is so 2000 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by technomom ( 444378 ) on Saturday July 09, 2016 @03:42PM (#52479257)

    I'm a senior level developers and it seems to me that recruiters are going straight to the source instead of posting.

    I get at least 5 to 10 emails or linked in posts per week pumping my ego and trying to get me to join the latest hot startup!!! Bean bag chairs!!! On site dry cleaning!!! Ping pong!!! Stock options that may actually be worth something.... Or not!!!!

    • Re: Posting jobs is so 2000 (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I will second that. Much of our recruiting has been through networks. Job boards have just been shitty and costly.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        As a recruiter, I'd say that the problem with job boards is that 95+% of applicants apply for jobs they've never done before, and would not be considered for by the hiring manager. Searching for and contacting people who are qualified, and hoping that they'd be interested in the job on offer, is more likely to result in a hiring

    • I got one today and it literally said "free beer and more minge than you could shake a stick at".

      • minge

        That was a typo. It was supposed to read, "mange".

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          minge

          That was a typo. It was supposed to read, "mange".

          Are you ready to make the jump to Mangement?

      • "Free beer and more manga than you could shake a stick at".

        Where do I sign up?

      • What?

        Link?

        I'm EU work eligible. Dual citizen...what kind of beer?

        I'll find my own minge. 'Target rich' environments are good. Do they get free beer as well?

        /.ers want to know.

    • Haha yeah, I get 3-5 recruiters contacting me every day.

      Sometimes its a big company (Facebook, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, etc.) but more often than not it's endless small shitty startups.

      I always respond with the same answer: No thanks.

    • On site dry cleaning!!!

      What self-respecting tech worker wears anything that would need dry cleaning? What is this, 1971?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        That means their office is located in one of those shopping center strips, between the dry cleaner and the payday loan place.

      • What self-respecting tech worker wears anything that would need dry cleaning? What is this, 1971?

        My current employer offers on-site pickup and delivery for dry cleaning to this day. It really does look like they think it's 1971. It's not free, either. Not even cheap. Just local. I've never once seen something on the rack in my building. In the building full of sales droids and business types, the service gets used. Go figure. And that would be why the company continues to spend money on it. Some middle manager is using the service regularly, and has the clout to keep it, even if 1000 other peo

        • My current employer offers on-site pickup and delivery for dry cleaning to this day.

          Get out while you're young.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ziest ( 143204 )

      Yeah,

      I'm getting at least half a dozen emails a day about yet another hot startup. Most of what they tell me sounds like bullshit. They really hate it when I remind them that I can't pay a mortgage with options. Show me the color of your money, sucker.

    • I've been told recently by several recruiters that no one ever follows up on any resumes that come in from job boards, or even their own job posting websites. I do get many calls when the recruiters find my posted resume off Careerbuilder etc, but never any response from applying to anything on them. A trick I picked up was updating my resume every week, even just shuffling stuff around as that puts it back up to the top of "fresh" resumes lol.

      • I have known that for years, even pass it on to anyone looking.

        Also, put a skills summary at the top of the resume. It's an easy way to pack in key words.

        Make sure you list 4 to 5 accomplishments per position. That's another way to pack key words.

        Stuff like

        2010-2015 Acme Corp
        Sr Unix Engineer
        * Deployed multiple OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) servers to use as Oracle DB Rack.
        * Maintained AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and Linux servers.
        * Managed CentOS (RHEL) 5, 6, and 7 servers using puppet and Spacewalk (Satellite ser

    • I would be so happy with 5 to 10 a week. Right now when I count up the calls to my cell phone, messages to my personal email, and linked in messages, I am getting between 75 and 100 a week. Over the last two months, it has been so bad that, I have had to turn the ringer off on my phone.
    • Question: I've heard of employers offering on-site dry-cleaning. To me, an ideal job allows me to wear jeans and t-shirts, neither of which I would ever dry clean. I do not believe I'm alone in my view of an ideal job. So, why is on-site dry-cleaning considered a perk?

  • Looking for a job? (Score:5, Informative)

    by WarJolt ( 990309 ) on Saturday July 09, 2016 @03:43PM (#52479267)

    Qualified individuals are hard to come by. It's not the fact that there aren't jobs. We just don't have time to interview 20k practically worthless applicants to find that one hotshot that knows his stuff. There are alternatives. I research github accounts.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Suppose I don't want my work in a public Github area?

      • Looks to me like there isn't an alternative. This is what is expected. You must do what is expected. I'd like to hear from others.

        • So what is expected of a developer in a field where free software is by far the exception [pineight.com]? Commercial video games are non-free far more often than not, as are player software for rented movies and (U.S.) income tax return preparation software.

  • The article, and the headline, are bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)

    by cunina ( 986893 ) on Saturday July 09, 2016 @03:51PM (#52479307)
    RTFA, and you'll discover the following:

    - The 40% figure is based solely on the author's job board (which this article was meant to promote).
    - He makes some vague claims that he's "been tracking a few of our closest competitors for a couple years," and that data "trends along" with theirs, but he offers no concrete numbers, and the the plot he provides actually shows no such thing.
    - The author provides no real, provable explanation as to why this is (supposedly) happening.

    He may still be accidentally right about the jobs market, but this article really says only one thing: that 40% fewer people are using Authentic Jobs. And I'm more willing to conclude from that that they're getting their asses kicked by Indeed and LinkedIn.

    • Re:The article, and the headline, are bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Shadow99_1 ( 86250 ) <theshadow99@gmai l . com> on Saturday July 09, 2016 @04:33PM (#52479563)

      Having been looking (and not finding) a new tech job in my area (within 100 miles of my home) for over a year... He's probably not wrong. I just don't see the jobs on 'job sites' anymore.

      And everyone says it's all moving to social media, but even there I just don't get much interest. I get hits on things like linked in, but since I'm now 37 I regularly get asked why I'm still in IT. When I say I still want to work in it because I like it and I'm good at it I never hear back.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I work on the network / support side of things. I live in Vermont. I rarely if ever see temporary IT positions posted. Dice.com is nearly dead, - the same jobs are still posted months later, the same is true of a few local IT recruiter pages. The interviews I've attended are still hiring 6 months later, for the many positions I've interviewed for. A good friend of mine had to move to Arizona to get into the programming side of things, as everyone here apparently wants him to have 2+ years of programming ex

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Khyber ( 864651 )

          "Dice.com is nearly dead"

          That and Glassdoor and Monster and CareerBuilder and many of these other job/professional sites are just bullshit. Half of the jobs posted are really just a means of information-gathering for survey companies or resume stealing fucks, there was never a job available in the first place, but spending the meager one-time listing fee to get all that information under the guise of a job offer makes financial sense.

          You have better chances of finding actual work on Craigslist, and even the

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Don't you know that software development is for kids? Christ, even my 10 year old nephew can do it! If you're a real adult you show that you can boss people around.

        • Hey, get enough of those "boss-people-around" folks in a meeting room, and you can extend a 3 week project into 3 months easy.

      • Wait until you hit 60. Or even 50. Too old for tech, too inexperienced at anything else.

        • What happened to this profession. (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Wait until you hit 60. Or even 50. Too old for tech, too inexperienced at anything else.

          Ain't that the truth!

          And folks who aren't in the business still think things are like they were in 1999 and wonder why you can't get work. And folks who are but either still in their 20s just brush you off because "if you were any good and have the skills, you'd have a job."

          My brother just hit 50 and he's afraid of losing his job - he's training H1-b replacements with a promise of an eventual promotion. He sees the writing on the wall since his last promotion was canceled due to a reorg and is looking fo

          • I think some of it is finding the right niche. I switched from C++ to C# and had a LOT more attention from hiring managers and multiple offers.

            If you're a sysadmin/IT and you keep the same job, I know people who have been able to stay on for a while, but many get replaced by "the cloud". Larger companies with fancy DMZ's and stuff like that still need sysadmins.

            When I want to see what the unsupplied demand is, I look at dice and see what has the most hits.

        • I already get comments that I'm to inexperienced for anything else. Just to tide me over from the draught I applied to places like the local pizza shop... Who turned me down for 'lack of restaurant experience'. The same sort of thing happened all around when I tried to find 'regular' work. Heck factories told me that my history in IT made me a high risk of leaving when something better came up and somehow factory employers want people to commit long term.

          In the end I did get a part time job... With the US P

          • Welcome to the future. When I was between programming jobs I worked as a receptionist/office manager job. Not exactly programming, but as you said, paid the bills.

            Even that wouldn't have been an option prior to transition. For some reason, employers aren't so critical when it's a woman applying for a "normal" job. Work history doesn't matter as much, I guess because it's "expected" that you're not going to work uninterrupted from the day you enter the work force to the day they kick your carcass out the d

      • Re:The article, and the headline, are bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday July 09, 2016 @11:03PM (#52481173) Homepage

        Really??? Maybe it's where you live that's the problem. I live in Houston (not exactly a tech Mecca), and have found NO shortage of tech jobs, even though I'm 50.

        • I live in Northwest PA, which is not exactly a tech mecha... But in the past their has always been a good number of jobs as their are any number of companies around which, of course, run all sorts of computer systems. Now the market just seems dead. A few postings exist, but most are ones I've interviewed for and who knows exactly what they want because they are still there (and are from names you'd recognize).

          The interest I do get always seems to be 'why haven't you gone into management if your any good?',

        • Wait until the economy turns bad...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        We only post jobs on our site just in case somebody wants to apply, but normally we contact candidates directly.
        If you want to find a job, you should advertise yourself (github, linked in).

        It is hard to hire in tech.

        We reject most candidates either on technical basis (typically lack of potential, but also mismatched perceived skill vs actual) or cultural basis (won't be a good team fit).

  • I live in the Seattle area - lots of jobs. More like use of his site is down. Indeed, Careerbuilder, Craigslist - all full of jobs.

  • There have been a ton of niche job boards crop up over the past few years, which are targeted to precise audiences and that are creating more competition.

    In other words, he's getting his butt kicked by the competition. But he's in denial, so he blames the job market.

  • My first thought is that perhaps employers are figuring out that with many job boards largely full of scammy recruiters (No, I didn't check the board that's the subject of the article), and don't want to play in that kind of sandbox anymore.

  • At least where I live. Combine with in house software for referral links, and i dont miss job boards.
  • It may just as well be that the number of competing job boards doubles ever year and the postings distribute equally. Reminds me of TV channels: they kept increasing until eventually no one cared anymore and cut cable all together and became more selective again about what they subscribe to (netflix, hulu, hbo, etc.). With this constant increase in job boards, they may all become collective irrelevant eventually and maybe people are indeed no longer posting jobs on them. So maybe both of these effects are a
  • The top job boards are all shit. So much as look at your account sideways and you'll be inundated with useless fucking spam from a guy named Deepak (It's always fucking Deepak, too) who has some $15 an hour phone support position in Detroit that he thinks your 30 years of software engineering experience would be perfect for. If a company is posting a position on a job board, it's because they're paying severely under market, have a shitty working environment, or are planning to get rid of that position in l

  • the crash is on!

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