There has been a lot of press regarding the low employment rate in the US (reported by the government as somewhere in the 5% range).  Certain sectors of the job market are hot, such as IT positions. However, in many other sectors of the job market, things are pretty tough.

Many of the advertised positions are lower-paying jobs. I recently did a somewhat unscientific analysis that proves that this is the case.

I surveyed posted positions on two very popular job posting sites, LinkedIn and Indeed.  Many of you already know that LinkedIn Jobs is a popular, but paid site and Indeed is very popular job posting site and is generally free to post.

I did the analysis using jobs posted within 100 miles of Philadelphia PA (MAS Recruiting’s office location) and then broke the jobs down by salary level.

Here is what I found:

LinkedIn
Total Posted Positions in last 90 days: 315,996 as of January 21, 2016

80k+ Jobs: 37, 782 (12.0%)
100k+ Jobs: 15,752 (5.0%)
120k+ Jobs: 7,453 (2.4%)
140k+ Jobs: 3,384 (1.1%)
180k+ Jobs: 1211 (0.3%)
200k+ Jobs: 518 (0.2%)

Indeed
Total Posted Positions in last 90 days: 289,687 as of January 21, 2016

80k+ Jobs: 39,107 (13.5%)
100k+ Jobs: 20,048 (6.9%)
120k+ Jobs: 9,451 (3.2%)
140k+ Jobs: 4,439 (1.6%)
180k+ Jobs: 971 (0.3%)
200k+ Jobs: 359 (0.1%)

The findings are remarkably similar and show that between 75% and 80% of all the posted positions are paying 80k or less in salary.  To me, this shows that companies are very careful with their hiring and willing to add lower salary positions to fill some needs, but will not generally hire higher salaried roles unless absolutely necessary.  All of this ties in with what I have seen in my business since Q4 2015.