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.
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.
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?
If Dice is reporting a 45% drop in postings, then the actual drop in available jobs might be even much steeper. At least in the Cleveland market, headhunters are all sniffing around for any scrap they can find. While it used to be that every job would have 4-ish headhunters advertising for it, that number is now somewhere around ten. Note that my rough analysis is based on the commonality of obscure phrases or skill sets ("Python is a Big Plus"). I don't mean that Python is obscure, but that unique wording shared among postings (especially in Cleveland) lets me know that it's probably the same job with a headhunter doing a cut & paste into his own description. That companies are adopting standardized vendor managements systems where job requirements are presented to all qualified (gone through proper procedure) headhunters only adds to the redundancy. It used to be that a hiring manager would simply call up his favorites and circumvent the other eighteen firms who have an established contract with the company.
