The best and worst places to find a job in the U.S.

By Tammy Joyner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Frustrated job seekers might want to consider Washington, D.C., or its neighbor to the north, Baltimore, to find work. Government and defense jobs are plentiful in both cities, where there are fewer than three unemployed workers for every job opening, according to a new survey by a national online job search engine.

Finding work is more than twice as tough in Atlanta, which fell below the middle of the pack of 50 cities examined by Juju.com in its first “Job Search Difficulty” survey.

Juju analyzed U.S. Department of Labor unemployment statistics in each metro area and then divided that number by the number of job openings in each city, company vice president Brendan Cruickshank said.

Atlanta ranked 31st in the survey, with 7.5 unemployed people for every job listing. Nationally, there were 6.1 unemployed workers for every job opening in October, according to government data released last week. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10.2 percent. The unemployment rate in Atlanta was 10.5 percent, unadjusted, in September, the latest data available.

“Hospitality, construction and manufacturing have been particularly hurt by the current recession and Atlanta was heavily reliant on those industries,” Cruickshank said. Like most of the rest of the country, though, Atlanta is relatively awash in openings in the health care and education fields.

While the job search may be hard for Atlantans, consider Detroit’s predicament. Motown, which ranked last in the survey, was found to have nearly 22 unemployed workers for every job opening. Declines in the auto and manufacturing industries there have severely hurt people’s chances of finding work, Cruickshank said.

One positive note: Detroit still has 9,800 job openings on Juju’s site alone, mostly in health care and education. The city needs doctors, physical therapists and nurses.

The findings, Cruickshank said, reaffirm what most Americans already know: finding a job in this recession takes stamina. During the last three major recessions — in 1982, 1991 and 2001 — it took more than a year for the unemployment rate to peak after the downturns officially ended.

Juju was one of the first employment search engines on the Internet in 1998, and was originally known as job-search-engine.com. The site was relaunched as Juju.com in January 2006. Compiling listings from company Web sites and job boards, it averages several million job openings at any given time, Cruickshank said.