What are some of your best sources for accurate jobs reports? Many people might quote the U.S. Labor Department, but there is some strong evidence that suggests job search engine Indeed.com is a quicker and more reliable source for salary and available jobs data.
Paul Hamaker of the Birmingham Science News Examiner decided to perform his own job report evaluation using Indeed and the Labor Department to determine which one has the more reliable monthly reports. Here’s what he discovered:
The number of jobs available nationwide from all of Indeed.com’s sources is displayed as looking backward seven days. This includes the majority of local newspapers, national newspapers, Monster, Careerbuilder, Federal Government, State Government, Local Government, and a host of others.
I looked at Saturday because that captures a full previous week including the Sunday Newspaper job ads, all the weekly headhunter postings, and all other jobs posted at the sites Indeed.com covers. The pay scale is from $7/hour to $300,000 a year.
One can infer the following from the chart and data tabulated below.
1) Indeed predicted an increase in hiring at least two weeks prior to the Labor Department report for the same time frame in May 2009,
2) Indeed allows a broader spectrum inspection than the Labor Department data because it is searchable in boolean logic,
3) The correlation between Indeed.com and the Labor Department statistics for the same time frame has an r value of 0.97. For those who do not know about r values this is good correlation, very good in fact.
4) A probable savings to the taxpayer would be farming out the statistical reporting to Indeed.com as their data is just as predictive as the Labor Department, more timely, and it is free.
This sounds like a strong argument in favor of Indeed. What are your best sources for statistics? Do you wait for BLS reports, or do you track your own using the aforementioned methods?
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