Mar 2010

We’re coming up on a full year of aggregating Product Management job postings around the Seattle area, and have just posted our 1000^th listing.   I find this pretty amazing that there are so many jobs.   This would imply that there are actually THOUSANDS of product managers in the Seattle area.

I started our posting deep in the recession last year and have tracked them on a monthly basis, so here are some stats as we approach the end of March 2010.     We gather them daily from various sites including Monster, Careerbuilder, Yahoo, Dice, Indeed, Craigslist and from some of the major employers directly.   We also clean them out on a weekly basis as jobs listings get closed.   

Product Management jobs include the titles Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, and a few Segment or Category Managers.    Jobs could be full time hires or shorter term contract.    Our Seattle “area” ranged from Bellingham down to Tacoma, though only a few postings were really outside King County.

Here’s a month by month assessment of how things have gone and the trends.

The Jobs Posted line indicates the number of new postings in any given month.    December saw the beginning of an upward trend moving from about 60 per month to over 100 jobs the past few months.

Jobs Closed indicates the number of postings removed.   It’s hard to say that these were actually hires, as they could also have just been closed with no hiring.    This line has been erratic, but generally less than the number posted.   In February, there was a big spike in Jobs Closed, and from looking at the March data, this may have been to a large number of listings getting closed that had been open a while. 

The Month Ending Cumulative is the total number of open postings on the site at the end of the month.  As more jobs are being posted than closed, this number has steadily increased from about 125 during last summer to 255 open in March.

Other stats:

• Microsoft leads with 27% of all job postings, plus several agency postings for contractors.
• Amazon – 14%, Starbucks – 4.5%, AT&T – 3%, T-Mobile – 2.4%
• Contract jobs appear to be a bellwether for hiring.   During the summer months, there was an average of only 5 contract jobs per month.  This doubled starting in October ahead of the overall job increases and runs at about 10% of monthly postings currently.
• Mobile accounts for 14% of the job industry classifications, however a search for "mobile" in the all postings reveals nearly a quarter of them getting a hit.  

Conclusion? – Well, companies are posting and at an increasingly stronger rate than last summer, so things are clearly picking up.   I’ve heard through discussions that competition is fierce, as there are many good PMs (including former Director or VPs) competing for the jobs.   As I don’t have any stats from “the good ol’ days”, I can’t compare where we are relative to two years ago.    I’ve also heard that some of the job descriptions are very tight and employers are willing to wait for the "perfect" candidate.   Amazon, in particular, is very slow to hire, while Starbucks seems to fill its roles very quickly.    My assessment is employers are optimistic and willing to open positions, but are still conservative about the hiring decision.    There may also be a domain expertise mismatch in available candidates as more and more positions are for online, social media and mobile-related services.    Let's keep our fingers crossed the recovery continues. 

Don Vendetti