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Generalists dominate ranks of professionals in the job market

 Many more generalists than specialists are looking for work in this year's down job market. This is based on a analysis  of data for the past three months. NimbleCat's grading engine can differentiate between a specialist and a generalist (product plug intended!). This enabled me to track how many marketing and HR generalists and specialists were in the job market over the last three months. In each case generalists in the job market constituted over 40% of all professionals in those fields and  topped the list by a margin exceeding 50%.

This validates what most of us might conclude from  anecdotal evidence.  It certainly is likely that, in difficult times, companies will prefer to hire for specific, highly focused jobs.  Therefore, they are more likely to hire specialists.

So, does your social profile or resume peg you as a generalist or a specialist? Find out. Go to www.nimblecat.com, click on the green"find a better job" button, create a free account, and grade your LinkedIn profile or resume.

Did NimbleCat grade you correctly? Tell me at smehta(at)nimblecat(dot)com or just comment here. Also look for a Facebook app in the near future that makes  grading your profile much easier.

As a follow up to my post last month - the number of recruiters in the job market continues to be higher than it was earlier in the year. This was true in September and the trend has continued in October.

Connect smart with experienced professionals, and find cool tools for job seekers at NimbleCat.

New Manufacturing Jobs in Rust Belt Up By 2%

The number of new manufacturing jobs created in Rust belt metro areas in October increased to 11% from 9% in September. The difference was accounted for by new jobs in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin metro area. The DC and Baltimore metro areas claimed another 6% of  new jobs.  No west coast metro areas figured in the top ten.

Supply chain and logistics jobs were in the majority with 45% of all manufacturing jobs. However, as in previous months, jobs for manufacturing professionals made up a respectable 33%, with product planning and procurement jobs accounting for 22%.

Jobs for lean manufacturing pros, who are also called "black belts" or Kaizen experts, made up 11% of all manufacturing jobs, as they have for the past three months. These are pretty unique people. They have a strong background in manufacturing and management. What's unique is that they have trained to become teachers and leaders in improving the performance of  manufacturing plants. These professionals are leading the way to make the United States more competitive.

Did you know that you can identify and connect with experienced manufacturing professionals with experience at NimbleCat? Find out for yourself. Try the People Search app on Facebook or visit us at nimblecat.com.

California And New Jersey Grab 24% Of New Biotech Jobs

California and New Jersey grabbed 24% of all new biotech jobs advertised in September this year. The metro areas of Middlesex and Newark in New Jersey dominated other metro areas with 10% of all biotech jobs for the month. Over 50% of the jobs created were in clinical research continuing a trend that I identified in my August post on biotech jobs.

Oakland and Los Angeles together attracted almost 60% of all biotech jobs in California. The remainder were distributed evenly across the state with San Francisco, San Jose,  Orange County and San Diego attracting a fair share of jobs as well. 

The biotech jobs picture in New Jersey is much more focused. More than 84% of all biotech jobs in the state were created in the two metro areas of Newark and Middlesex, which are adjacent to each other. 

There is a continuing focus on clinical research and validation in the biotech industry. Most of the jobs in these two areas, from what I understand, have to do with moving new drugs and devices through the clinical trial and regulatory process. It would seem then that pharmaceutical and biotech companies are working hard on getting new products approved and to market.

Did you know that you can identify and connect with top professionals with experience in all biotech specialities at NimbleCat? Find out for your self. Try the People Search app on Facebook or visit us at nimblecat.com.

Finding people you don't know yet but need to connect with is hard

You need to connect with people you don’t know, but it’s always been difficult. Business people live with this every day: recruiters need to find good candidates, sales people need new prospects, consultants need to build out their network. And cold calls doesn't go very far until you know who to call.

As for the rest of us, how many times have you found yourself facing a tough one-on-one the next morning and wishing you could talk  about it with someone qualified? You can't talk to your colleagues, because that might reveal too much. You might not want to talk to your mentor at work, if you even have one, for the same reason. What you need is to connect with someone in your profession who can understand the situation, might even have gone through something like it and might be willing to help. Not so simple. Most of us cannot just pull the right contact out of the hat.

If you have a bit of time and luck, there are options. You might go to LinkedIn, Jigsaw or a similar site. The person you need to connect with is probably on one of those sites, so you put in some keywords and take a look at the results. You'll get a lot of results—lots and lots of results!—but you won't have a clue which lead you should follow first, because keywords, or even complex search strings, don't tell you "who the person is" from a professional point of view. But that's what you really wanted to know, isn't it?

We introduced  a service yesterday that speaks to this very need. You can read the details here, and you can try it immediately. Just go to Facebook and find the People Search application, or click here http://apps.facebook.com/ncsearch.  This is our opening round of solving this very difficult, but very important problem. Tell me what you think at smehta [at] nimblecat [dot] com.

 

Number of recruiters in the job market increases by 3%

The number of recruiters in the job market jumped by 3% in September. According to numbers from NimbleCat, recruiters made up fully 10% of the top ten professionals in the job market last month. This is noteworthy because the number of jobs for recruiters has not decreased. In fact, NimbleCat's numbers show that the number of open positions for recruiters increased a bit to 7% in September.

What's going on? The simplest explanation is that many recruiters may be re-entering the job market after the summer months. So there's going to be more competition.

The positive trends that I've been writing about recently continued in September. Demand for product managers and project managers stayed strong. And, demand for logistics and other manufacturing professionals continued at approximately 10% of the top ten jobs. All good.

My next post will preempt the job market reports we have been presenting, and instead talk about our new search product in detail.  Look for it next week. 

9% of new manufacturing jobs in Rust Belt metro areas in September

9% of new manufacturing jobs in September were created in the Rust Belt metro areas of Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis. Long Beach and Huntsville each attracted 2% of new manufacturing jobs.   The manufacturing jobs we track at NimbleCat are shown in the chart below - logistics, supply chain, industrial engineering, procurement, lean manufacturing and production planning.

One can reasonably argue that logistics and supply chain jobs are also created by companies that are importers of goods, and not manufacturers. So I checked. I can confirm that excluding supply chain and logistics jobs did not change the overall manufacturing numbers in any significant way. Detroit, Minneapolis and Huntsville moved up in the rankings a bit. You would expect that to happen since these cities are, and from these numbers, continue to be centers of domestic manufacturing.

I can also confirm that a healthy percentage of new manufacturing jobs - 33% - were for lean manufacturing experts and industrial engineers. This number is virtually unchanged from August and signals to me that we can expect some stability, if not growth, in domestic manufacturing. The Friday job numbers from BLS  will complete this story, but this is my "glass half full" take on it :-)

Are you recruiting for manufacturing jobs? Get an early preview of a new product we are introducing this month. Email me at smehta [at] nimblecat.com. See what we have to offer for job seekers at http://www.nimblecat.com.

Most Job Openings for Recruiters on East Coast in August

It's a good news, bad news story for recruiters who are in the job market - depending on where you live. The metro areas with the most jobs for recruiters in August were on the East coast of the US. Boston, New York, Atlanta, DC and Chicago were the top five cities for recruiter jobs. 

That said, employers have been hiring recruiters at a steady rate for most of this year. On average, 6% of all job openings that NimbleCat has monitored since April of this year were for recruiters.

The Middlesex, New Jersey metro area figured  in the top ten metro areas for August. I don't know much about Middlesex. Any one know what's going on in the recruiting market there? I did a preview of the data for September. Middlesex figures in the top ten cities for recruiters this month too. If you have more information on this or any other information you'd like to share, please post a comment.

In the not so good news section of this post, there were only two West coast cities in the top ten, Seattle and Phoenix - and no California cities. As a long time resident of California, I wish this was not the case :- (.

Are you hiring recruiters? Send me an email at smehta [at] nimblecat.com to participate in the early access program for a new product we'll announce soon. See what NimbleCat has to offer for job seekers at http://www.nimblecat.com/jobs.

DC, Chicago and Atlanta maintain lead in cloud computing jobs

DC, Chicago and Atlanta continue to attract cloud computing jobs in August as they have since we began tracking this segment in May of this year. Companies in these three metropolitan areas continued to create jobs for database administrators, network engineers and systems administrators. These three professions  are essential to maintaining the large server installations that provide cloud computing. There were a significant number of jobs in one or more of these professions in  New York, Boston and Seattle also.

In an interesting twist,  the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the surge in cloud computing is effectively "reducing the need to invest in expensive technology equipment". A company can now use computing clouds provided by Amazon and other vendors at a fraction of what it costs to purchase and maintain computer equipment. I know of least one Silicon Valley firm that is now operating its Software as a Service (SaaS) business totally from the cloud. Undoubtedly there are more.

If you hire for positions like this, or would like to be contacted by recruiters for these positions, send me an email at smehta [at] nimblecat.com to participate in the early access program for a new product we'll announce soon.

Marketing and HR pros dominate ranks of job seekers in August

Marketing and human resource professionals dominated the ranks of professionals  in the job market in August. 38% of these marketing professionals had significant management experience, versus 27% of all human resource professionals.  

It's a good news, bad news story for marketing professionals. There has been steady demand for product managers for the last few months. In contrast, new jobs for outbound marketing professionals in August made up less than 3% of the total.

This chart supports our job numbers for August. 18% of the marketing professionals we aggregated in August were in the outbound marketing professions of marketing communications and product marketing; another 14% had experience across multiple marketing disciplines. Product management professionals made up only 2% of the total. 

NimbleCat aggregates several hundred thousand resumes and social profiles each month. Our unique classification engine analyses the professional and managerial experience in these profiles and resumes in real time and enables us to bring you blog posts like this.

Do you want to connect with or recruit these individuals? Send me an email at smehta [at] nimblecat.com to participate in the early access program for a new product we'll be announcing soon.

Strong demand for product managers, manufacturing experts and recruiters in August

Demand for product managers continued  strong in August - 10% of all jobs that NimbleCat aggregated last month were for product managers. This is a continuation of a trend I've been tracking for several months which indicates that companies are creating new products and services and improving existing ones.

  Second, demand for manufacturing experts, specifically in logistics and industrial engineering  is strong. Manufacturing jobs in these two areas made up 12% of the top ten jobs in August. Demand for logistics experts only could simply indicate an increase in imports, since imported goods have to be warehoused and transported to stores. However, there is strong demand for industrial and manufacturing engineers as well. This is an indicator that manufacturers want to improve their domestic manufacturing capability.

Finally, demand for recruiters continues to hold at 6% of the top ten jobs as it has for the last few months. To me this indicates that companies intend to hire more people. I know this is at odds with some of the job market surveys I've seen recently, but its hard to argue with real jobs posted by real companies - and that's what we blog about here.

If you're looking for a job, hiring for a job or want to track the job market, check out our real-time job market map at http://www.nimblecat.com/jobs.