In addition to reporting the volume of job listings by state and by industry each month on LinkUp.com, we’ve also started looking at the top 75 job titles from our job search engine. Below are the top 75 job titles found on LinkUp in April. (The list is EXACT job titles so there may be multiple titles for certain positions – for example, Registered Nurse is listed as #1, RN is #18, and Staff RN is #75).

LinkUp, one of the leading job search engines in the country, indexes job listings found on only on company web sites (16,874 company sites in April). Unlike other job search engines such as Indeed or Simplyhired, LinkUp does not aggregate jobs from other job boards but rather aggregates and publishes only jobs pulled directly from company web sites themselves. As a result, job listings found on LinkUp are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

LinkUp’s job listing report for February showed that nearly every single industry tracked by the job search engine experienced a decline in new and total job listings for the month. Similar to the state by state data, 32 of the 37 industries reported a decline in new job listings with all new listings by industry declining by 14% from January. In terms of total job listings by industry, the overall decline was 11% with 31 of 37 industries showing a decline during the month.

LinkUp, one of the leading job search engines in the country, aggregates and publishes only job listings found on company web sites (14,190 company sites in February). Unlike other job search engines such as Indeed or Simplyhired, LinkUp does not aggregate jobs from other job boards but rather indexes only jobs pulled directly from company web sites themselves. As a result, job listings found on LinkUp are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

Of the handful of industries that saw an increase in job listings during the month, Consulting & Freelance, Restaurant & Food Service, and Retail experienced the largest increase in job listings in terms of both quantity and percentage. The industries that suffered the largest declines in percentage terms included Aerospace, Defense, & Aviation, Marketing, and Automotive. The industries with the largest declines in the quantity of job listings included Heath & Medical, technology, and Sales & Business Development.

After fixing two significant problems with our data (normalizing the data to account for a constantly growing database of companies and not counting duplicate jobs that companies re-post to their corporate web site every day with new URLs), we have finally generated an accurate, insightful report that provides a completely unique snapshot of the U.S. job market. The table below lists the number of new and total job listings, by state, found on 11,463 employer web sites from around the country.

Only 18 states showed an increase in new jobs, with Maine, Alaska, and Oklahoma showing the biggest increases and 20 states had an increase in the total number of job openings. Not surprisingly, 30 states saw the number of new job listings decrease from October while 29 states experienced a decrease in the number of total job listings. Indiana, Connecticut, and Tennessee were the hardest hit in both categories. In total, the number of new job listings on company sites dropped 5% from 1.2 million to 1.14 million, while the number of total job listings dropped 4% from 1.5 million to 1.44 million.

The data is generated from LinkUp.com, a job board that aggregates individual job postings pulled directly from company web sites such as Target, Apple, or Google. Because the job listings come directly and solely from the career sections of corporate and employer web sites, the jobs are real, current, and often unadvertised anywhere else on the web. LinkUp’s job postings also contain no duplicate listings for the same job because they are only sourced from a single site – the actual employer posting the job opening.

Last Friday, KillerStartups.com featured LinkUp in its daily poll (the site asks readers to vote on which of the selected startups will become the next ‘killer’ site on the web). The results made the Obama landslide look more like a razor-thin, legally-mandated-recount Minnesota Senate race with LinkUp annihilating the rest of the field.

Thanks to everyone who voted and thanks to KillerStartups.com. Now where can I go to pick up the theoretical internet dollars that I am sure we won?

Last week, we released the jobs report for October from LinkUp.com which showed that both new jobs and total jobs on the site rose by roughly 300,000 from September. (LinkUp aggregates and publishes jobs pulled directly from nearly 10,000 company web sites). Given the fact that the jobs are real and current (updated daily) and contain no duplicates (since they are pulled from a single source – the hiring company itself), we felt that the data was pretty reliable. But in light of the current economic meltdown and the nation’s rising unemployment, the magnitude of the increase from September was not only counterintuitive, it was, frankly, unbelievable. So we dug a little deeper into what might be inflating the numbers.

After some excellent sleuthing work by our team, we discovered that a relatively small number of companies (.4%) are assigning new unique URLs every day to all of the jobs they post on their own site. Our guess is that this allows the jobs to be ‘refreshed’ daily on other aggregating sites like Indeed and SimplyHired so that they appear higher in the search results. Our system for tracking new and unique jobs on LinkUp is tied to the unique URL for that specific job, so the new daily URLs that these companies assign to their jobs, even if it was on the site the day before, were counted in our system as brand new jobs. We hadn’t noticed this before because we deliver search results according to the quality of the match rather than by date of the post. We do this because all of the jobs on LinkUp are, by default, current, open, and available and we take them down immediately when the hiring company that posted the job on its own site removes that listing from its company site. So the ‘new daily URL, auto-refresh’ technique that distorts search results on SimplyHired and Indeed has no impact on LinkUp. This creates a better service for Job seekers using LinkUp, but clearly has an impact on our monthly report about the number of job listings by state and by industry. It also impacts others as well (see related points here and especially here).

By our estimate, the October report, for example, was inflated by 420,931 jobs. (Of course, September and all prior months were inflated by some large number as well for the same reason). The 38 companies we flagged for reassigning new URLs to their jobs each day posted a total of 40,430 actual unique jobs to their corporate sites during the month. But because of the fact that they constantly assigned new URLs to those openings, our systems counted that pool of jobs as 461,361 new and unique jobs. Needless to say, we’re both chagrined by the findings and pleased to have identified the culprit. And the fact remains that LinkUp published almost 1 million real jobs from real companies in a single, convenient site with the best search results of any job board on the web today.

Even worse than expected, today’s jobs report from the Department of Labor was dismal, with the U.S. economy shedding 240,000 jobs in October. This was the 10th straight monthly decline, and the nation’s unemployment rate now stands at 6.5%, a 14 year high. So far this year, 1.2 million jobs have been lost, with more than half of those losses occuring in the past 3 months.

What I am having trouble reconciling, however, is the data from LinkUp.com which shows dramatic increases in the number of job openings from over 9,700 company web sites that post jobs. While certainly not representative of the entire U.S. economy, LinkUp aggregates job listings from enough companies around the country, large and small, to provide some indication of what is going on in the broader economy, and yet there is a complete disconnect. As I pointed out yesterday, the total number of jobs for the almost 10,000 employers rose from 1 million to 1.3 million in October, with gains in virtually every state. Just as surprising, the job openings by vertical showed gains in almost every industry except Banking & Financial, Real Estate, and Restaurant & Food Service.

Again, these are real jobs from companies that are posting job openings on their own corporate web site. They are current, available, and often unadvertised anywhere else in print or online. But they are job openings, while the jobs numbers are actual jobs lost. And perhaps that is what explains the apparent discrepancy. Thousands of companies are laying people off in areas where they need to cut back given the current business climate, while some portion of those same companies, and/or thousands of different companies, have job openings in other areas of their business or are trying to grow their businesses given their own particular circumstances. At a minimum, the 1.3 million job openings found on LinkUp.com in October might provide some glimmer of hope that the unemployment picture may not be as gloomy over the long-term as some economists are predicting. We’ll see.

The October jobs report is scheduled to be released tomorrow morning, but if the data generated from LinkUp.com is any indicator, the numbers may not be as bad as economists predict. LinkUp aggregates and publishes job listings directly from company web sites themselves. The September and October jobs data includes job listings from 9,753 companies in the U.S.

For those 9,753 companies in the data set, total jobs listed for the month rose from just over 1 million in September to 1.3 million in October. New jobs posted to their company web sites rose from 777,299 in September to just over 1 million in October. Every state showed an increase in both new jobs and total jobs posted with the exception of Oregon and Idaho.

We’ll see how this data compares to the U.S. Department of Labor figures released Friday, but my guess is those numbers will show continued massive erosion of jobs throughout the economy. Assuming that is the case, the challenge will be in reconciling the information. While the LinkUp data only includes job openings for roughly 10,000 companies in the U.S., they tend to be larger companies that actually have jobs posted on their company web sites (the average company found on LinkUp had 133 jobs posted on their site in October). As a result, the site does not factor into account the millions of small businesses that do not have a company web site or post jobs on their company web site if they have one.

Regardless to what extent the LinkUp data is an indicator of what is happening in the broader U.S. economy (and I happen to think it is relevant to some degree), there is no doubt that LinkUp is the single best site on the web to look for a job. Where else are you going to find 1.3 million current, real jobs from real companies, many of which are unadvertised anywhere else on the web? Just as appealing, those jobs are made available without the hassle of having to wade through irrelevant postings, 3rd-party clutter, annoying advertising, job scams, and phishing and identity theft expeditions.

One of the recent changes we have made in examining LinkUp jobs classifieds data is to report the number of new and total jobs listed on the site by job category and compare them to the previous month. As the chart below indicates, the 3 categories that showed the largest gains in August were Education & Training, Engineering & Architecture, and Technology. Combined, those 3 categories accounted for an increase of 11,403 new job openings on the company web sites being aggregated on LinkUp.com. In terms of declines in new and total job openings, Banking & Financial Services, Sales & Business Development, and Admin & Clerical showed the largest declines.

LinkUp.com aggregates job listings that employers post on their own corporate web site. These job listings or openings are often not advertised anywhere else on the web or in print. As well, the aggregated data, pulled from  9,713 companies of all sizes and in all industries throughout the U.S., does not include any duplicate job listings. But while the data presents a high-quality, unique, and relevant snapshot of the nation’s employment picture, it is not meant to represent the exact number of job openings in any given category. The vast majority of companies in the U.S. do not list their job openings on their company web site, if they even have a corporate web site, and LinkUp is still accumulating data from new companies being included in the data set. (LinkUp’s job data in July included 8,307 companies – 1,406 fewer than the total number of companies included in August’s numbers. This increase in companies being aggregated certainly has an impact on the comparison to July’s numbers).

August employment figures are not scheduled to be released until Friday morning, but if LinkUp data provides any type of early indicator, the nation’s employment picture continued to worsen in August. The number of total job openings posted on corporate web sites dropped 3% from July, while the total number of new openings posted showed no increase at all. While the percentage declines are smaller than they have been in recent months, the overall employment picture remains quite bleak. LinkUp.com aggregates and publishes job listings pulled directly from 9,713 corporate web sites from around the U.S.

In August, a total of 919,833 positions were listed on corporate web sites, down from 947,745 in July and 991,804 in June. Of those job listings, 695,879 were new positions, virtually unchanged from July. Unlike July’s numbers, when over 25% of the decline in total jobs were accounted for by California alone, August’s sharp decline in total jobs was evenly distributed among roughly a dozen states, with Illinois losing the most jobs (4,266). Connecticut showed the largest increase in both total job postings and new job postings, rising by 2,825 total job listings and 3,284 new job listings.

LinkUp.com aggregates job listings that employers post on their own corporate web site. These job listings or openings are often not advertised anywhere else on the web or in print. As well, the aggregated data, pulled from  9,713 companies of all sizes and in all industries throughout the U.S., does not include any duplicate job listings. But while the data presents a high-quality, unique, and relevant snapshot of the nation’s employment picture, it is not meant to represent the exact number of job openings in any given state. The vast majority of companies in the U.S. do not list their job openings on their company web site, if they even have a corporate web site, and LinkUp is still accumulating data from new companies being included in the data set. (LinkUp’s job data in July included 8,307 companies – 1,406 fewer than the total number of companies included in August’s numbers. This increase in the number of companies being factored into the data most likely resulted in a less negative snapshot than was actually the case throughout the country in August).

Thanks, by the way, to Small Business Information Technology Weekly for the excellent review of LinkUp.

Mirroring the figures released by the Department of Labor last week, data released by LinkUp.com on Monday provided further evidence that the nation’s jobs picture deteriorated substantially in July. The number of total job openings posted on corporate web sites dropped 4% from June, while the total number of new openings posted dropped 2%. Even more alarming, only 10 states in the nation showed an increase in the number of total jobs posted, and only 15 states showed an increase in the number of new positions listed. LinkUp.com aggregates and publishes job listings pulled directly from 8,307 corporate web sites from around the U.S.

In July, a total of 947,745 positions were listed on corporate web sites, down from 991,804 in June. Of those job listings, 694,392 were new positions, down from 706,111 new positions listed in June. Over 25% of the decline in total jobs was accounted for by California alone, which saw a decrease of 11,937 total job postings. Maryland showed the largest increase in both total job postings and new job postings, rising by 1,735 total job listings and 2,156 new job listings.

On August 1st, the Department of Labor reported that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 5.7% in July from 5.5% in June with a total of 51,000 jobs eliminated during the month. For the year, a total of 463,000 jobs have been shed by employers throughout the country. Figures for May and June were revised slightly upward, with 26,000 fewer jobs lost than previously reported. (See related analysis here).

LinkUp.com aggregates job listings that employers post on their own corporate web site. These job listings or openings are often not advertised anywhere else on the web or in print. As well, the aggregated data, pulled from  8,307 companies of all sizes and in all industries throughout the U.S., does not include any duplicate job listings. But while the data presents a high-quality, unique, and relevant snapshot of the nation’s employment picture, it is not meant to represent the exact number of job openings in any given state. The vast majority of companies in the U.S. do not list their job openings on their company web site, if they even have a corporate web site, and LinkUp is still accumulating data from new companies being included in the data set.