2011 was a tough year for job seekers. We’ve battled high unemployment, stagnant home prices and a global financial crisis, centered on Europe. But we’ve also started to see green shoots of growth, and there are reasons to be hopeful as we enter 2012.

Employment is growing, particularly in the private sector, which has added jobs for 22 straight months and grew faster in 2011 than in 2010. There are plenty of reasons for job seekers to be optimistic, irrespective of the sector they work in.

Indeed’s own data indicate that, in December, there were 50% more jobs advertised than a year prior. Our Industry Employment Trends show that healthcare is not only the biggest employer but also the fastest growing, up 52% in the last 12 months. Rising demand for preventative care and an aging baby boomer population will continue to create opportunities for health services professionals. Education and transportation were the runners-up, with 48% and 39% growth, respectively, in the last year.

Our Top 10 Job Trends were dominated by information technology specializations, including mobile technologies. Another growth area is the energy sector, which saw a sharp rebound in the number of jobs.

Job creation can be limited by discrepancies between supply and demand – often it’s hard for employers to find candidates with the right skill-set. This is where Indeed can help. Indeed Resume, a free and open resume search engine, was launched in 2011. Over two million resumes are searchable by employers and we expect that figure to grow significantly in 2012.

Last year, Indeed drove billions of visits to job boards and corporate career pages. The majority of applicants and hires generated by this traffic were delivered to companies for free through our organic search results. In addition, more than 25,000 customers sponsored their jobs on Indeed, paying for additional traffic to their jobs, resulting in hundreds of thousands of hires. More than 50,000 job seekers told us how Indeed helped them get a job.

Indeed’s most recent job posting data suggests that job growth will continue in 2012, albeit at a modest pace. We expect traffic to our sites to continue to grow, as we make our job search results more comprehensive and more relevant in each of our 53 country sites.

We’d love to hear your feedback and wish you all the best for a successful year ahead.

Indeed’s recently updated Top Job Trends, a list of the fastest growing keywords found in job postings, consists entirely of information technology and social media terms. New specialties typically emerge in information technology faster than in other sectors, driving employer demand for people who have such skills.

However, interesting growth trends occur throughout the job market. A notable example is the increasing global demand for energy, which has resulted in a growing number of job postings containing keywords related to fossil fuels, renewable energy, and sustainability.

Fast growing fossil fuels job trends include: Oil, shale, crude, frac, and natural gas.

The top locations for the keyword search oil are:

Houston, TX
Oklahoma City, OK
Denver, CO
Dallas, TX
Tulsa, OK

Engineers, geologists, and drillers are among the positions in the oil industry with the most job postings available right now.

The increase in job postings with the keywords sustainability, solar, wind, and renewable shows that a growing number of career opportunities are being created in these areas of the energy industry.

Prominent examples of sustainability job opportunities include the development of energy efficient buildings, products, and communities.

Enter any keyword into Indeed’s Job Trends search box to see its trend.  Click Find Jobs to view current postings.

Have you identified job trends that you’d like us to share with job seekers?  Please let us know.

This month marks Indeed’s seventh anniversary. Indeed.com was launched in November 2004 as the most comprehensive search engine for jobs, enabling job seekers to search millions of jobs from thousands of job boards and corporate career sites. By focusing on being the best place for job seekers to search for jobs and for employers to find the right candidates, Indeed has thrived over the last seven years.

We started expanding internationally in 2005, and now have sites in 53 countries and 26 languages. In every market, we have gained the loyalty of job seekers by putting their interests first and providing the best possible job search experience. With more than 50 million unique visitors and one billion job searches per month, Indeed’s sites are now the most trafficked job sites worldwide according to Google Adplanner.

In 2005, we launched Sponsored Jobs, allowing advertisers to feature their jobs and only pay when job seekers click to find out more. Because jobs are included in our search results for free, we allowed advertisers to pay for performance rather than inclusion – the first time a job site had offered auction-based pay per click job advertising. With more than 9,000 companies sponsoring their jobs, Indeed is the leading pay-for-performance recruitment advertising network and the most cost-effective source of candidates for thousands of companies.

Beyond our own sites, tens of thousands of partner websites have integrated Indeed job search, reaching more than 40 million additional unique job seekers and passive candidates, and generating hundreds of millions more job searches every month. Job search is also an increasingly mobile activity, and Indeed’s iPhone and Android Job Search apps are the most widely used by job seekers globally.

Our revenue comes from advertisers, but our success depends on providing the best possible experience for job seekers. Our efforts to improve job search are ongoing. Some of these are visible, like our addition in 2008 of search by salary – a unique feature allowing job seekers to find all jobs that pay a given salary based on our estimates. Others are invisible, such as the algorithmic improvements that we roll out continually to give job seekers even more relevant search results.

With data over time from half a billion job postings, our Job Trends yield unique insights into the job market, including the fastest growing skills and the cities with the most job postings per capita. As Indeed’s traffic grew, we added job search and click data to reports like Industry Employment Trends. We also combined government unemployment figures with our data in Indeed’s Job Market Competition index.

This year we launched our most significant new product to date: Indeed Resume. This open resume service allows job seekers to upload their resumes and make them freely searchable by employers. With over two million resumes already, Indeed Resume has gained considerable traction with both job seekers and employers. Ultimately, it represents Indeed’s transformation from job search service to a global marketplace for jobs and recruitment.

Through all this growth, we never lose sight of the fact that our users are people, that our services touch some of the most important aspects of their lives – their jobs and their livelihoods. Many of the stories behind the jobs people find through Indeed go untold, but we are gratified to have received more than 50,000 personal stories to date.

It has been a successful seven years for us. Our organization has grown to over three hundred employees and five office locations: Austin, TX, Mountain View, CA, New York, NY, Stamford, CT, and London, England. If you are interested in joining our team, take a look at our open positions.

Most importantly, we’d like to thank everyone who has helped us succeed, including job seekers, advertisers and publisher partners. As always, let us know if you have any feedback so we can continue to improve our services.

Paul & Rony

In honor of Veterans Day, Indeed is proud to announce the launch of Indeed Military veteran job search at military.indeed.com. Veterans can now enter their Military Occupational Code (MOC) to search for civilian jobs on Indeed that match their skills and experience. For example, find the best jobs for veterans with MOC code:

• 4301 – Basic Public Affairs Officer (Marine Corps)
• 2T271 – Air Transportation Craftsman (Air Force – Enlisted)
• 12B – Combat Engineer

Indeed was honored to be invited to the White House this week for President Obama’s announcement of new initiatives to get veterans back to work. Veteran job search is part of our ongoing commitment to the White House Joining Forces campaign to support military families. Last month, we announced free, open resume search for military candidates.

Visit military.indeed.com today to get started.

We recently analyzed millions of job postings to update Indeed’s Top Job Trends – a list of the fastest growing keywords found in job postings.

Indeed’s Top Job Trends of 2010 provided a clear picture of fast growing employer demand for expertise in mobile operating systems, social media, and a variety of areas in information technology.  The updated list shows that demand is continuing to increase.

Top Job Trends

1. HTML5

2. MongoDB

3. iOS

4. Android

5. Mobile app

6. Puppet

7. Hadoop

8. jQuery

9. PaaS

10. Social media

The exponential growth of HTML5 job postings kept it at the top spot on the list.  HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML.

Popular job titles for positions that cite HTML5 as a desired skill include: web developer, front end developer, software engineer

The four keywords below also maintained a spot on the updated Top Job Trends. The most common job title for each trend is listed next to it.

Android (mobile operating system): android developer

Mobile app (application software for handheld devices): mobile developer

jQuery (web application framework): web developer

Social Media: marketing manager

Additions to the Top Job Trends include:

MongoDB (open source, document-oriented database): software engineer

iOS (mobile operating system): iOS developer

Puppet (IT infrastructure management): systems administrator

Hadoop (distributed computing platform): software engineer

PaaS (platform as a service): programmer analyst

Enter any keyword into Indeed’s Job Trends search box to see its trend; click Find Jobs to view current postings.

To view job posting trends by industry, be sure to check Indeed’s monthly Industry Employment Trends report.