Estimate: Top US Firms Have Over 700,000 Job Openings
mast-economy.blogspot.com
mast-economy.blogspot.com
Even if this is true, it doesn't necessarily mean the economy's doing better. It's pretty likely that the job openings require skills that the newly unemployed workers do not have. Otherwise, they'd be filled. You can't hire a former real estate agent at Google and expect him to be immediately productive. (Hell, you usually can't hire a software engineer at Google and expect him to be immediately productive, but at least you can hire him.)
The issue with recessions is misallocation of capital, and it can't be fixed with a magic wand. You generally have to wait for people to retrain in new, productive areas of the economy, and for capital to be liquidated and entrepreneurs to find new uses for it. That's why it takes ~4 years instead of ~4 months.
"Yesterday we embarked on a research project to find current job openings. We started with 21 firms (with 18,839 open positions) and now we're up to data from 100 of them. (All Fortune 500)"
The chance that a random sample of 100 firms are all in the top half of the sample universe is 2^100 = about a decillion. Doesn't really look random to me.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2008/full_...
Question: Using an appropriate random number generation between 1 and 1000, what is the sample size required to then estimate the total job openings on the 1000 sites?
In some cases, the listing is to satisfy an HR rule and the person to be hired has already been selected. In other cases, it's "maybe someone wonderful will wander in".
And then there are the hires that happen without a listing.
I'd guess that the actual uncertainty in the total is more a function of the uncertainty in the numbers than it is in the sampling.
totally agree. As with any indicator there is quite a bit of uncertainty. And as you suggest "there are the hires that happen without a listing..." Most career counselors would agree that there are actually more hidden jobs than what the boards suggest...
So... your argument might just boost the number if we add some multiplier into the model based on the jobs actually posted.
thanks! gne1963
Question: Using an appropriate random number generation between 1 and 1000, what is the sample size required to then estimate the total job openings on the 1000 sites?
With that large of a standard deviation and that average you can't assume a normal distribution so you need to use the T distribution.
Using the T distribution at a 95% confidence level I come up with an estimated average of [495, 923] which results in a number of jobs in the top 1000 from 495,000 to 923,000 with a 95% certainty.
Just for kicks I wanted to see what would happen if you sampled 500 times but had that same standard deviation. At that point your spread would be about +/- 100 for the average value of X.
If you are looking for a singular number you'll need to check all 1,000 of them, otherwise it will be an estimated range.
So what if I did another 100 random sample resulting a "better" (lower) std dev? At what level of std dev could one assume a normal distribution out to 1000?
gne