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Indeed.com, a search engine for jobs, has some interesting unemployment visualizations. The one at right is quite effective.

An important aspect as a consumer of data is to ask yourself what does the data mean. When I first saw this graphic, my first impression was that this showed me the difficulty of finding employment in certain geographic areas. Is this the case?

What data is presented?

The data in the table represents the ratio of job posts to unemployed people. The graph clearly states that unemployment data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I wish the graph equally well defined where the job post numbers come from. I believe job posts are the number of search results from Indeed.com filtered by the city name.

When first looking at the graph, my thought process was that I was looking at # of available jobs versus unemployment rate. How well do the search results at Indeed act as a surrogate for the number of open jobs? How long does a job posting stay in the search results beyond the time that the position is open? How much of the real job market does Indeed capture? This is not known based on information I could find on the site. The lesson here, I think, is that it is important to stop and examine what exact data is being shown on a visualization.

The next thing I thought about was whether it is better to show the ratios of job posts versus unemployed people or present a dot plot showing the number of job posts versus the unemployment number. It might be difficult to construct a dot plot with that many data points and still make it readable. The answer depends on one’s objective.

An important thing to realize is that a job market where there are 10,000 jobs and 10,000 unemployed in a particular city is quite different from a situation where there are 1 million jobs and 1 million unemployed in a city. Although the ratio in both is 1 to 1, the difficulty of finding a job in the two situations may be quite different. The unemployment rate would have an impact.

These are not necessarily criticisms of the data presented, just an indication that the consumer needs to be careful what conclusions can be drawn.

One thing I like is that this graphic does provide some context through showing how much of a change this months results were versus the previous months. This provides you some directionality of change data that could be interesting.

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