
Dice.com Shows 45% Drop In Tech Jobs  - epi0Bauqu
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/03/dicecom-shows-45-drop-in-tech-jobs/
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cstejerean
Dice shows a 45% drop in jobs advertised on their site. There's a very good
chance some companies are simply moving their job postings elsewhere or
cutting down the number of sites they advertise on in order to reduce costs,
or perhaps decrease the flood of resumes.

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TomOfTTB
Not only that it's important to remember that a lot of people are being
shifted around.

For example, Microsoft regularly had hundreds of job openings before the
downturn. So if they make cuts now the cut employees are going to take those
other open jobs. That gives you a massive drop in listings from Microsoft even
though no one actually became unemployed.

I mean, there are clearly fewer jobs out there and I'm not saying things
aren't bad. I'm just saying a drop in listings probably isn't the best
indicator of how bad.

~~~
endtime
I don't see the difference. If Microsoft fires and rehires 200 employees, and
therefore hires 200 less from outside, how is that different from Microsoft
not firing anyone and hiring 200 less from outside?

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icey
I'm sure part of it has to do with the signal to noise problem Dice has had
for the past few years.

I had a job listing there earlier this year and got ZERO good applicants out
of around 30 responses.

I posted the same thing on Craigslist (which cost me 25 bucks instead of 800
bucks) and I got over fifty applicants that had actually read the listing and
appeared qualified (out of around 130 responses).

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kennyroo
I'm launching a site next week for Internet-related job listings in the SF Bay
Area for just this reason. The bigger sites annoyed me both as an employer and
as a job seeker for the reasons you mention. I reached out directly to friends
and HR folks at local companies and have a pretty good number of listings to
start. Hopefully this will be a bit more targeted. I'll post to Ask HN for
feedback, post-launch.

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medianama
I run a free job site and I've seen 20-25% increase in postings...

Number of visitors are increasing 30-35% every month. Seems like good times to
me.

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coglethorpe
I run a personal finance blog and wrote a few posts about jobs. Some of the
best performing posts I've had in terms of search traffic.

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medianama
I hardly get any search traffic - around 15%, majority of them searched for my
domain name, in some form or the other.

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dannyr
I think the actual drop is smaller than 45%. A lot of the job postings on Dice
are by recruiters. More often, different recruiters post for the same
positions. So let's say there are 100 jobs less posted compared to last year.
It's likely that the actual # of positions is just 50 or even less.

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dannyr
In addition to that, I know that, at least in the Bay Area, there has been a
consolidation among smaller recruiting firms. That may contribute to the
decrease in job postings.

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slpsys
Also, big companies like Google have offed their recruiting arms, or at least
large portions of them. This is a red herring metric, at best.

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curej
Recruiters are often the first victims in a downturn. So I would say the
effect would be even more pronounced. Besides consolidation among smaller
firms and layoffs of in-house recruiters, many independent recruiters have
moved away from recruiting temporarily and may or may not return when the
climate changes. This happened in the early 2000s also. The net effect is a
dramatic drop in duplicated job postings on the major job boards which, to an
outsider or a Techcrunch writer, is interpreted as a dramatic slump in tech
hiring. As usual, statistics are easy to misinterpret depending on how willing
you are to look beneath the surface.

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stcredzero
Remember that jobs are a lagging indicator.

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pj
What do you think is going to happen to all the people who got laid off?

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curej
If they work in IT they have a much better chance of finding a job than anyone
else does right now - because of the long-term trend of labor shortages in IT.

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daniel-cussen
45% drop in _new_ tech jobs. It's not like 45% of techies got fired.

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auston
Perhaps the startuply guys can provide some data?

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LukeG
On the employer side, honestly, I don't think we're big enough for our data to
be statistically significant. I can say that we've had another record month of
traffic & applications.

Despite all the doom and gloom, people _are_ hiring.

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curej
"The latest unemployment numbers for 2008 for computer software engineers is
1.6%...That's beyond full employment":

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bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/htdocs/news/2009/031409-computer-
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