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From the link on your page:

"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.

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Thanks, nice catch and that post needs to be changed... momentarily... The universe was truely from the Fortune 1000 from the list publish online... not the top 500 only...

You can see my confusion is somewhat born out by hitting this link... it is labeled 500 when actually it lists the top 1000...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2008/full_...

So here is the methodology: 1. Hit the site above. 2. Randomly pick a company from the list... for instance: 3. Pick Paychex Systems... company 921 on Fortunes list... 4. On their site they list 137 job openings... 5. Add that to the total... 6. Repeat until you have a representative sample size

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?

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