A Dive into LinkedIn: Analysis of Job Posting Trends
Authors: Angelina Yang (Project Lead), Isaac Yu, Kevin Espinas, May Nicole Cagulada, Michael Zheng
With a user base of 1.1 billion as of January 2025, LinkedIn is by far the world’s largest social media platform for job posting and job seeking. But increased layoffs across multiple industries in tangency with slower hiring rates have turned the modern job search into a nightmare for most. In response to these shifting labor market dynamics, we can analyze LinkedIn’s job postings in areas such as job availability, industry demand, and skill requirements. By examining such factors, we aim to provide insights that help job seekers navigate an increasingly uncertain market.
What Locations Do Most Job Listings Come From? And Connections Between Location and Job Type
Looking into the locations that these job listings come from can give insight into what kinds of jobs specific parts of the country are looking for. Using the same LinkedIn postings from 2023 to 2024, we construct a heatmap of job listing counts for each state in the United States.
We see that states like California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois provide the most job postings. California and Texas are the largest states, with around 10,000 job postings, which is unsurprising. The East Coast as a whole surprisingly gave a less-than-expected amount of job postings, with New York naturally being the state with the largest count.
Naturally, we then look into what kind of jobs are being offered by the states with the most postings. To do this, we separated each state and took the zip code with the most job postings for each state. We also looked at multiple zip codes in California. After doing this, we created a word cloud for the job titles for each zip code.
For Texas, the zip code with the highest number of postings was 77002, which is in Houston. For New York, the zip code was 10001, which is in southeast New York City. Florida’s highest zip code was 33122, which is in Miami. Then for Illinois, the zip code was 60601, based in Chicago.
The common words between all the clouds are “Senior” and “Manager”, which also are the largest words in each cloud. While these are vague in terms of what specific job they are referring to, it seems that all these cities are looking for more senior or experienced employees. Engineers seem to be more sought after in cities like Chicago, New York, and Houston, while Miami seems to focus more on people in sales. More financial roles like associates and analysts are wanted in cities like Chicago, New York, and Houston. While the term engineer does show up rather large in the cloud, software engineers are not as large. While this may come to a surprise to those in tech, especially given the current job market, it is important to note that we have omitted California up to this point.
For California, the zip codes with the largest number of postings are 90001, 94101, and 92101, which correspond to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, respectively. In addition to this, we also include a zip code specifically in Silicon Valley, 95050, which corresponds to Santa Clara.
Much like the other states, it seems like each city still looks for those that are in senior or managerial positions. While there are job postings for Engineers in Los Angeles, it is not as prevalent in comparison to the other cities, rather, analysts are more desired. The common large word within all these clouds is “Engineer”, with “Software Engineer” being a lot more prevalent, especially in San Francisco and Santa Clara. More words that correspond to tech, specifically trendy words, are also prevalent in the clouds for San Francisco and Santa Clara. We see words like “AI”, “Data”, “Design”, “Technical”, “System”, and more. So it seems like the main tech roles are centered around Silicon Valley, which makes sense.
This visualization compares the average number of applications received for job postings at different companies, grouped by whether the salary was listed or not. Each company has two bars: one representing jobs where salary information was disclosed (darker blue) and one where it was not (lighter blue). The chart suggests that salary transparency can have a significant impact on job applications, even though the effect may vary by company. For example, companies like Capital One and Apex Systems see much higher engagement for salary-listed jobs, whereas others like Solomon Page have the opposite trend. This variation may be influenced by factors such as industry norms, job type, or overall brand reputation. The findings highlight the importance of salary disclosure in job postings and suggest that transparency could be a key driver of applicant interest on LinkedIn postings.
Which Industries Frequent the Job Boards?
Understanding the relative distribution of postings across industries could provide a better understanding as to why certain roles are more competitive than others, as well as highlighting which industries are more actively hiring. Using LinkedIn job postings from 2023 to 2024, we can construct a treemap that shows the top 10 industries with the highest amount of job postings in hierarchical order. Industries beyond the top 10 did not have enough job postings to hold a significant proportion of the treemap.
First, we merge two datasets — one containing the job posting’s metadata and the other containing the job posting’s company information — according to company ID. This ensured that each job posting held a valid company ID. Next, we cleaned the data by removing any empty variables and counted the frequency of job postings for each industry, sorting them in descending order. Finally, we extracted the top 10 industries and visualized them using a treemap, where the size of each rectangle represents the number of job postings in that industry.
We see that Staffing and Recruiting posted the most job openings, with 18,886 posts making up approximately 25% of the top 10 industries with the most postings. This is closely followed by Hospitals and Health Care, which has just around 4% less postings than Staffing and Recruiting. The rest of the industries, excluding IT Services and IT Consulting do not exceed 10,000, and we even notice that starting with Software Development, the rest of the industries do not even exceed 30% of the amount of postings in Staffing and Recruiting. This suggests that the Staffing and Recruiting must either have a high turnover rate, or the industry itself requires a large labor force to sustain company departments related to human resources. Regardless, it might be time to consider foregoing recruiting and become a recruiter instead.
Which Industries Get the Most Engaging Job Postings? And Effects of Salary Listings on Engagement
To begin our analysis, exploring the top active industries could provide valuable insights on the productivity of these industries in the Linkedin-verse. As a response, different industries/companies can implement the same strategies these industries use in order to achieve a certain engagement rate from users. For simplicity, our analysis will only include the top 10 industries, which all have 1,800+ job listings, and account for around 64% of all job listings in the dataset.
The histogram below shows the top 10 industries, listed in decreasing order of the number of total views. The light blue color indicates the number of views by industry for every job listing. On top of that, the dark blue color indicates the total number of applications by industry, which provides a good visual estimate on the applied-views rate (engagement rate) by industry.
One can examine that Staffing & Recruiting and IT Services & Consulting have the largest number of views by far in comparison with the other industries. In addition, Software Development, as expected, is also one of the leading industries in views. Unsurprisingly, the tech-industries are some of the leaders in views for job listings. The total number of applications seem to follow the total views trend more or less. However, it does seem hard to estimate just based on this histogram alone. Because of this, it is important to take a deeper dive into the engagement rate in order to determine whether or not total views and engagement rate is consistent per industry.
The histogram below shows a close up of the dark blue histogram from the previous histogram. However, it stands alone to give a better look and analysis of the engagement rate which was calculated by dividing the total number of applications by the total number of views for each industry. The dark blue line shows the median engagement rate by the top 10 industries. The median was used because the data is skewed and is shown in decreasing order.
As one can see, we can conclude that total number of views is not a clear predictor of engagement rate. Firstly, we examined that Staffing & Recruiting held the largest number of applications. However, they now hold the third largest position for engagement rate, with the two tech-industries leading the engagement rate with nearly 7%. To bring this into perspective, the median engagement rate is 2.25%. Another surprising detail is that Retail had the sixth highest total view count, but also holds the lowest engagement rate out of the nine other industries. This suggests that Retail companies are actively searching for employees, while many job-seekers are searching for other, possibly, higher paying alternatives.
What Are the Most Frequently Used Words In The Skills Description?
In today’s job market, the requirements and skills that are most sought after are constantly evolving. Thus, it’s crucial to understand what qualities employers generally value the most. Extracting the skills descriptions from LinkedIn job postings from 2023 and 2024, we created a word cloud to depict what keywords appear most frequently in the skills description section:
From this word cloud, the most frequent keywords are your general, bread-and-butter terms, such as “experience”, “ability”, and “knowledge”, traits that every employer looks for. However, looking more closely, there are a lot of keywords associated with soft skills and interpersonal traits, such as “customer”, “service”, and “people.” Another important aspect to note is that words such as “experience” and “ability” are much more prevalent than words such as “education” and “degree”, indicating that in today’s job market, tangible skills and hands-on experience reigns supreme over just possessing a degree.
Now, here’s are the most frequent keywords divided by entry-level and mid-senior level jobs:
The first noticeable difference that jumps out is that entry-level jobs are much more centered around soft skills, such as “communication” and “customer service”, whereas mid-senior level jobs are centered around technical skills, such as “software”, “data”, and “Excel”. Additionally, entry-level positions tend to have more keywords associated with low-skill industries, such as “physical”, “lift”, and “basic”, whereas mid-senior-level positions have more keywords associated with high-skill industries, such as “computer”, “system”, and “financial”. This illustrates that high-skill industries such as tech and finance aim to attract mid-senior-level candidates with seasoned experience, whereas low-skill industries relating to customer service and manual labor aim to attract entry-level candidates fresh out of education.
Final Thoughts
Our analysis of LinkedIn job postings from 2023 to 2024 reveal several notable trends. Firstly, job postings are concentrated in major states like California, Texas, and New York, with cities such as San Francisco and Santa Clara leading in tech-related roles. Senior and managerial positions dominate postings across most locations, while salary transparency significantly boosts applicant engagement for certain companies. Staffing and Recruiting remains the top industry by volume, though tech industries lead in engagement rates. Furthermore, entry-level roles emphasize soft skills, while mid-senior positions prioritize technical expertise. These insights can guide job seekers in tailoring their applications to meet market demands and increase their chances of success.
