Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Mining Jobmine: Part 1. Map of the Jobs

First, the map (bigger version here). This map shows where the jobs posted during last weekend's job postings are located. A slightly more interactive version is available here, but takes forever to load.


Yes, there is a job WAY up in the Arctic, and 28 people applied to it. I could have sworn too that there used to be jobs in New Zealand, Hawaii and Australia, but oh well.

A similar map counting the number of applications going to each city is available here (this also takes forever to load). However the two maps look pretty much the same, since the resolution of the bubbles are not that great.

What's also not clear in the maps is the actual number of jobs in Waterloo and Toronto areas. To make it clear, here are the top 10 locations with the most number of job openings.


If we take the top 10 locations with the most number of applications, we get something similar.


Now what happens when we look at the cities that get the most applications per opening? We get something COMPLETELY different.


The more "exotic" places like Saint-Hubert (where the Candian Space Agency is located), California and others don't offer many jobs, but the ones that are offered attract a lot of applications. Note though that I would take the exact ordering in the last chart with a grain of salt for two reasons: (1) the position that actually attracted the most number of applications is offered in "Various Locations" -- take a WILD guess what company offered that position (hint: start's with a "G") and (2) a lot of companies lie about the number of openings they have.

What about the places with the lowest applications per job?


I'll leave you to come up with your own conclusions here.

Finally, a note about data and methodology. Jobmine is the system co-op students/employers at Waterloo use to manage job postings and applications. Job name, location, opening and applications data were pulled off of Jobmine 8am this morning (posting closed 12am last night). Some location names are changed slightly to avoid multiple entries per name, and so that Google's Geomap tool would map it correctly (it mapped "London" to "London, England", etc.). When a job opening was in multiple locations, I took the first one. Jobs that put "Multiple Locations" or "Various" or something ambiguous as their location were deleted.

I plan to squeeze more goodies out of this data, so stay tuned. Incidentally, if you are familiar with Google Charts API and know how to make it go faster, please let me know.

End of Entry

3 comments:

Oliver Warbux said...

i coulda swore India consistently hired from UW [specifically engineers]. No postings this term?

Stephen said...

data can always be misleading, especially when you are having so many exceptions. Such as a lot of jobs located in US have a "fake" number of openings.

Unknown said...

@warbux maybe they're posting it in second round?

@stephen Yes you're right -- caution #1 applies to all the charts except #4 (especially the lower ranking cities). I would still put my money on Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Mississauga being the top cities in terms of job openings though -- but you probably would have guessed that =p