I looked at ~226,000 public job postings across 8 big US metros. 6 things that should change how you job hunt.
I looked at the data from public job postings on employers' own career sites (their jobs pages, not the reposts on Indeed or LinkedIn) in 8 metro areas: New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Boston and the SF Bay Area. About 226,000 open postings in total. A few patterns showed up in every city, and a couple of them go against what people usually assume.
|Metro|Open postings|Fully remote|Biggest single employer|What dominates|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|SF Bay Area|53,000|3.3%|Apple|Tech (41% of postings)|
|New York|46,000|4.0%|City of New York|Retail/hospitality, then a wide mix|
|Los Angeles|30,000|3.4%|Anduril|Aerospace/defense and industrial (26%)|
|Dallas-Fort Worth|27,000|3.8%|Methodist Health System|Retail/consumer (26%)|
|Chicago|19,500|4.2%|Northwestern Medicine|Healthcare (26%)|
|Houston|18,300|3.9%|Texas Children's Hospital|Industrial (28%) and energy (9%)|
|Boston|16,900|4.3%|Boston Medical Center|Healthcare (32%)|
|Atlanta|15,600|4.8%|Technical College System of Georgia|Retail/consumer and industrial|
**1. Remote is rare everywhere, including the Bay Area.**
Fully remote postings were between 3% and 5% in every single metro. The Bay Area was actually the lowest at 3.3%. If you're searching remote-only, you're looking at roughly 1 in 25 jobs. Widening to hybrid or local roles is the biggest single change most people can make to how many jobs they can apply to.
**2. In 6 of 8 cities, the biggest employer is a hospital system or a public institution.**
City of New York, Northwestern Medicine, Methodist Health, Texas Children's, the Technical College System of Georgia and Boston Medical Center were each the largest single poster in their metro. Big hospital systems and public bodies also hire for IT, finance, HR, facilities, admin and project management, so they're worth a look even if you don't see yourself as a "hospital person" or a "government person".
**3. Outside the Bay Area, tech companies are a small slice.**
Tech companies were 41% of postings in the Bay Area, but only 3% to 13% everywhere else. In Boston, New York and LA they were around 11 to 13%, in Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta about 7 to 8%, and in Houston 3%. Software developer is still one of the most common roles in most of these cities, even though tech companies make up a small share of all postings. If you're a developer or analyst only applying to "tech companies", you're likely skipping a lot of the openings in your own city.
**4. Most jobs aren't in the city everyone searches.**
In the Bay Area, about two thirds of postings are outside San Francisco itself (Santa Clara, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View). In LA it's about 60% outside the city of Los Angeles (Irvine, El Segundo, Costa Mesa, Long Beach, Torrance). In Dallas-Fort Worth over half are outside Dallas (Fort Worth, Plano, Irving, Arlington, Frisco). Boston has almost 40% outside the city (Cambridge, Waltham, Quincy). If your job alerts are set to the main city name only, you're missing a big part of your own market.
**5. Every city has its own hiring engine, so tailor your targets.**
* LA: aerospace and defense (Anduril, SpaceX, Aerospace Corp, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab), plus USC and UCLA Health
* Boston: hospitals, universities and biotech (Boston Medical Center, Harvard, Mass General Brigham, Dana-Farber, Vertex)
* Chicago: hospital systems (Northwestern, Endeavor, Advocate, Lurie Children's) plus finance (Northern Trust)
* Houston: hospitals (Texas Children's, Houston Methodist, Harris Health) and energy
* New York: city government, hospitals, ad agencies and media (Interpublic, NBCUniversal), banks
* Bay Area: chips and AI (Apple, NVIDIA, Applied Materials, OpenAI, Google)
If your background fits one of these, it's worth going straight to those employers' career pages rather than waiting for them to show up in a job board search.
**6. Almost everything is full-time.**
Between 88% and 93% of postings were full-time in every metro. Part-time was 6% to 11%, and contract work barely shows up on employer career sites at all (under 1% in every metro). If you're specifically after contract work, employer career sites don't seem to be where most of it gets advertised.
**How much to trust this**
Treat the counts as a map of where employers are advertising, not a count of people being hired. Some companies leave the same opening up for months or post one role hundreds of times, so the rankings favor big, always-recruiting employers. The data also leans toward organizations big enough to run their own careers page, which means small shops that only use Indeed or Craigslist are underrepresented. Pulling this together from thousands of different career sites isn't easy, so think of it as a best-effort snapshot rather than an official count. I also kept salary out entirely because the figures weren't reliable enough to quote.
If you only change three things after reading this: apply on the employer's own site, set your alerts to the whole metro instead of the city name, and drop the remote-only and tech-only filters unless you genuinely need them.
#Houston#Houston#Houston#DFW
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TX Hospitals & Health Systems
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