Is there any way to graphically represent Craigslist job posting trends for the past 5 years?

When people say “there are no jobs” this generally means “I was earning $50,000 a year and now the only jobs I can find pay $20,000 a year.”

Personally, Craigslist is not a place that I would choose to go to utilize to look for a job.

You would probably have to look for HR metrics for online ad placements overall, and extract Craigslist numbers from a source that compares it to other online ad placement sites. The idea with ad placement is that the advertiser places the position on sites where potential candidates would look. What’s the demographics of the a Craigslist user compared to the salary and education requirements of the position advertised? When I think of employment and Craigslist, I think of “Need to Hire 16 People for Sports Marketing!” or “Part-time church secretary needed”

Over the past five years people’s usage of internet sites has likely increased, so wouldn’t any graph you used based on those would be liable to only show changes in internet habits? Or in any case have real trends masked by those?

Craigslist, specifically, has expanded a lot during that time.

I’ve found legitimate, well paying jobs for professional work on Craigslist before. Maybe it varies from city to city but Craigs is my primary job search place, even before local newspapers, individual websites, word of mouth, and monster.com.

To add to what has already been said, there is a lot of crap on Craigslist – scammers, fake job postings, reposts… It would be hard to differentiate. Just because there is a job posting on Craigslist doesn’t mean it really exists or you haven’t already counted it twice.

I’ve been scanning job postings for a while now. It’s not that there aren’t any jobs – at least where I live. If you have a well defined skillset, there is work to be had. Even in my industry which has stagnated, people are still hiring. What I have noticed is that there are much fewer entry-level jobs (which makes sense).

@mirifique, you might want to see if simplyhired.com can do what you’re looking for.

Here’s a graph I created there comparing Craigslist to Monster.com

If you look on the right hand nav, there’s a link to Simply Salary. The average craigslist job salary is $27,000, while the average monster.com salary is $35,000.