As we enter 2016, we took some time to see what the Google search volume trends are looking like for some primary technical recruiting-relevant search terms. We used the Google Trends tool used often by even some of the most sophisticated data analysis think-tanks. Google Trends is often used for marketing analysis purposes by companies when their marketing team is looking for newly emerging “trends” that seem to be generating a lot more interest than in the past and therfore might merit some investment in (for example) a particular hot new industry, technology, product or human-interest topic.
As an engineering and IT recruiting firm, we wanted to see which engineering job types were getting the most Google searches over-time heading into 2016. We analyzed a lot of engineering and IT job categories. For purposes of this blog post, however, we thought you might find it of interest to get at least a snippet of information from our study; so this post will comment on search trends in Google from 2004 to January 2016 for these high-level, core engineering and IT job recruitment categories:
HERE ARE SOME OF THE CORE ENGINEERING AND IT JOB RECRUITMENT CATEGORIES FOR WHICH WE DID GOOGLE SEARCH VOLUME ANALYSIS
- IT jobs
- Engineering jobs
- Mechanical engineering jobs
- Elecrical engineering jobs
- Civil engineering jobs
- Software enginering jobs
- Network engineering jobs
WHAT IS GOOGLE TRENDS?
Using Wikipedia as the source for this definition: Google Trends is a public web facility of Google that’s based on data-mining through the massive amounts of Google search data that they collect. Using Google Trends will allow you to see how often a particular search-term keyword or phrase is searched for on Google relative to the “total search-volume” forall Google searches for anything else except that search term – across the entire world – over time. So it doesn’t show you the exact volume of searches, it instead shows you how that particular Google-search word or phrase compares ( by volume-of-searches) as weighted againt all other searches being done on Google at that same time – and then shows the results on a comparative trend line graph over time, *typically” from 2004 to the present.
And all of the Google Trends data can also be available broken down into various sub-regions of the world as well; such as for a specific country, U.S. state, metro area, and more.
NOTE HOWEVER: If Google doesn’t have enough data on a particular search keyword or phrase, it tells you: Not enough search volume to show graphs.
IT JOB SEARCHS VS. ENGINEERING JOB SEARCHES ON GOOGLE OVER TIME
To begin, lets see how searches for “IT Jobs” compares relative to searches for “Engineering Jobs” using the Google Trends web services.
Google Search Trends_ Analysis Charts_IT Vs Engineering Recruiters_January 2016
You’ll notice in this chart above that (as you might expect) Google searches for the phrase “engineering jobs” became “reportable” in Google’s data first (see the red line in mid-2005), and then high-enough volumes of searches for the phrase “IT Jobs” (relative to all Google searches for everything else) emerged about a year later – the blue line. Then they had a similar amount of searches until about 2011 when “IT Jobs” started getting more searches on Google.
ANALYSIS OF HIGH-LEVEL CATEGORIES OF ENGINEERING JOBS SEARCHES ON GOOGLE OVER TIME
Now, as an engineering recruiter and IT recruiter in Minneapols St. Paul Minnesota, this more detailed drill down into search trends for more specific engineering job types started getting more interesting. Often, these studies bring surprises to our technical recruiting team who intuitively think more searches are done for one engineering discipline than another, but the Google Trends engineering jobs search data shows a different result.
The next chart analyzes five different engineering types:
- Mechanical engineering jobs
- Elecrical engineering jobs
- Civil engineering jobs
- Software enginering jobs
- Network engineering jobs
Do the chart results below match with your thinking?
Google Search Trends_ Analysis Charts_Engineering Jobs Categories_January 2016
Clearly, looking at the chart above, technical recruiters and hiring managers and corporate recruiters can see that “mechanical engineering jobs” is a bigger piece of the job search and recruiting world than the IT worlds’ “network engineering” category.
To learn more about Google Trends, click here
To learn more about George Konik Associates’ IT recruiting services in Minneapols, click here
To learn more about George Konik Associates’ engineer recruiting service in Minneapolis, click here