If you are a recent graduate, middle-aged professional who is considering changing career or just a person curious about the state of US labor market, here is the list for you – 10 easiest cities to find a job in 2016. With unemployment rates continuing to go down and job market gaining millions of new openings, it seems that America’s economy has been slowly recovering from the blow it suffered during recent recessional years. Still, job growth has been uneven across the US, and while some places are facing a lack of labor force, others are struggling to drop down the number of jobless residents.
BLS reports that in the period between December 2014 and December 2015, the US’ job market gained 5.6 million job openings, which is more than in 2007, the year when the number of new jobs reached the peak. Hires have returned to their pre-recession levels, and separations are near the figures from 2005. Finally, the ratio between unemployed people and job openings has significantly declined in last six years. While in 2009, 6.8 jobless working age Americans applied for one job, in December last year, that number was 1.4, which is an improvement, even compared to pre-recession 2007, when there were 1.8 unemployed persons per one job opening. While these numbers look promising, they do not depict the whole reality of US economy and its struggles to recover from the recession.
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The latest National Association of Counties’ study, which examined the state of counties economies taking into account annual changes in jobs, unemployment rate, economic output (GDP) and median home prices, showed that only 7 percent of all analyzed areas recovered in all four indicators while 16 percent have not showed improvements in any area. The decline in unemployment rates and the return of home prices to their pre-recession levels are two most pronounced indicators that US economy is slowly going towards full recovery. However, in terms of economic output and job gains, the majority of counties did not make much progress. Nevada is one of the few states in which counties recorded better economic growth, which is one of many reasons why you should check out our article 11 best places to get married in Las Vegas.
In creating the list of 10 easiest cities to find a job in 2016, we used rankings made by Indeed and WalletHub. Indeed, which gathers job postings from 1000’s websites, made a list of 50 US cities with the highest number of job openings per capita, while WalletHub based its ranking of job markets using 8 different criteria, including employment growth and opportunities, unemployment rate, industry variety and so on. We found most populous cities that appear on both lists and listed them by average ranking. We also present you each city’s unemployment rates and job growth (data taken from BLS), average hourly wage for December 2015, and per capita personal income (PCPI) which was obtained from Bureau of Economic Analysis
