Jobs in Social Media and Web 2.0 on the Rise!
December 30, 2006 by Lisa Oshima | Social MediaWhen I’m curious about what particular companies are up to/ the strategic direction they’re heading, I often look on their careers web pages and scroll through the open vacancies. It is hard for companies (especially those in high-tech) to find what they’re looking for in candidates without getting specific about the specific skills they’re after.
I recently found another great resource for getting a wider sense of where the market is going – Indeed.com’s job trends tool. Indeed crawls the web looking for millions of jobs and provides a one-stop-shop for job searchers. In 2005, the site posted over 35 million jobs culled from thousands of websites. They’ve recently opened up their archive of jobs allowing people to search this archive and plot job trends over time.
Today, I did a search for the most popular social media keywords. The results (below) are really interesting. They indicate that companies everywhere are beginning to realize the value of social media and the importance of hiring staff with social media skills:
For any of you out there, who are unable to post comments, please feel free to email me.
Post Script Jan 2, 2007: Vox doesn’t yet allow for trackbacks on comments. It also doesn’t allow non Vox users to comment on posts. This morning, I heard from via email from non-Voxer, Sophie, a Marketing Manager at Indeed, who kindly clarified a few of the questions that were raised in the comments for this post. She confirmed that no job remains in the Indeed index for more than 30 days and they do their best to filter all duplicate and spam/scam job listings. So, the information in their trends section should be pretty accurate.
, and I will manually post your comments. It’s good to know that non-Voxers are reading! To any of you Voxers out there that feel frustrated by the inability of non-Voxers to post, please write a blog about it titled: “Six Apart: Why Can’t Non-Voxers Post Comments? (and other feature ideas)” and give your thoughts. Please use the tags: blog, Vox, comments, trackbacks, Six Apart, and whatever else you feel is appropriate.
5 Responses to “Jobs in Social Media and Web 2.0 on the Rise!”
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[this is good]
Wow – that's a really powerful illustration of the growth of social media.
Interesting, especially the Podcast chart.
Nice tool, Lisa, but the tale of the graphs lies in the fact that when something is quite small and grows, it does not take much to create a dramatic increase. When you look at the percentage of figures along side the graphs, they put this into perspective and far too many people get blinded by the graph's line to see what the number actually is.
Podcasting is in terms of .002% (two thousanths of one percent) or .00002 of jobs posted and that is a small number. The blog line is on the magnitude of twenty times the podcasting numbers.
Indeed's site does not indicate how many of the jobs are duplicates of those found on multiple sites, so the 35 million figure can be legitimately questioned as well as the actual number of podcasting/blogging/social media jobs reported. There are probably far few jobs than the number given – especially for web 2.0 jobs which may be listed on multiple sites.
Another consideration is that the job base was collected in 2005 and we are at the end of the 2006 job market and that means some of the data may be getting stale.
Understand that I fully endorse social media, blogs (I do write one), etc. and I hope to see these numbers grow significantly over the next year. But, for now, I find the growth interesting, but not yet a mandate to business.
Thanks for your comments – excellent points! To clarify – I didn't mean to imply that the increase is reflective of a statistically significant shift or a “mandate to business”- just an interesting indicator of change (even if a small one). One additional point of clarification- the job base on used by Indeed extends beyond the 35M jobs collected in 2005 and includes jobs currently posted in 2006 (though, I'd be curious to know when jobs officially reach their “End of Life” stage on Indeed). You're right on the multiple postings front- jobs may be posted on multiple sites which could skew the data, though in my experience using the search facility, Indeed does a good job of deleting duplicate entries from search results (I'm not sure if that's just my luck or if they do, in fact, delete multiples). Please keep your comments coming!
Please see the latest Post Script from 2nd January 2007 under my December 30th Post “Jobs in Social Media and Web 2.0 on the Rise!” for information from Indeed.com's marketing manager. Thanks!