u/andreikurtuy

I looked at BLS labor market data across 49 major US metros and ran a difficulty index against the national average. The spread is wider than I expected going in.

Most of the hardest metros are coastal and tech-heavy. Six of the top ten hardest are in California, and San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle are all still working through the post-2022 contraction. White-collar hiring hasn't bounced back the way blue-collar has, and that's a big part of why these metros are still rough.

The easier side of the list is mostly Southeast and Midwest. Birmingham, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, Indianapolis, Kansas City. Lower cost of living, less concentrated in any one sector, and a lot of the hiring that's actually happening in the US right now is happening there.

Full list of 49 metros plus the methodology is here.

Curious what people think is driving the gap. The tech contraction explains part of the coastal pain, but I don't think it fully accounts for how much the Southeast is outpacing.

Pulled BLS labor market data across 49 major US metros and ranked them by a difficulty index against the national average (1.0x = average). Estimated weeks to placement is modeled from time-to-fill stats, so it's a proxy, not a guarantee.

A few things that stood out:

• San Francisco runs roughly 3.4x harder than Birmingham right now
• Six of the top ten hardest metros are in California
• The easier list leans Southeast and Midwest, which tracks with where hiring has actually been shifting

Full list of all 49 metros plus the methodology writeup is here.

Happy to get into how the index was built in the comments.

My name is Andrei Kurtuy, co-founder and CMO of Novorésumé. We built a resume and career tools platform that now has 18 million users across the world.

The backstory: I grew up in Romania and moved to Copenhagen at 19. Before any of this, I racked up over 1,000 job rejections. That experience taught me more about how hiring actually works, and doesn't work, than anything else. It shaped a lot of how I think about resumes and job searching, and eventually fed into why my co-founder and I built Novoresume.

I also hold a CPRW (Certified Professional Resume Writer) credential, have reviewed thousands of resumes across industries, and have spent years studying what actually gets people hired vs. filtered out.

I also create content about careers in F1 and motorsport, salaries, hiring pipelines, how people actually break into the paddock. That content has reached millions of views across platforms. You can find me here if you are interested in working in F1.

Proof: https://imgur.com/a/4gU2n84 | Author Page

Happy to answer anything about building a product to scale, the real mechanics of hiring and resumes, what 18 million users teaches you about job searching, or what it actually takes to work in Formula 1.

What do you want to know?