Apple vs Microsoft (1995-2015)

https://revenuesandprofits.com/apple-vs-microsoft-revenues-and-profits-1995-to-2015/

Econ PhD Job Market

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-next-generation-of-economists-are-working-on/

Unicorn Ecosystem? Scott Galloway

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/11/big-tech-and-the-city/546827/

Of The Four, three are located in Silicon Valley, and one is located in Seattle. What do you think this kind of geographic clustering means?

There’s just no getting around it, there’s something in the water on the West Coast: an optimism, a risk-taking, a land of second chances, combined with the fact that it has some of the best engineering universities in the world. It’s Berkeley or Stanford or Caltech; even the UW [the University of Washington in Seattle] has come a long way. I don’t think you can find a company that’s built more than $10 billion in shareholder value in a three-year period that isn’t a bike ride away from a world-class engineering university.

Lots of people talk about “the rise of the rest.” Do you think there are any cities that can compete with San Francisco or Seattle in generating one of these big companies?

Find the universities that are gaining the most traction in engineering or STEM and you’re going to find an ecosystem that can produce a unicorn. My money would be on St. Louis, because of Washington University, which is starting to attract the finest human capital in the nation. Whoever gets the smartest 18-year-olds, 10 years later, they get a unicorn. Pittsburgh is also a great candidate because of Carnegie Mellon. You know how they say “follow the money”? I say follow the university rankings, specifically for engineering schools.


Three of the big four, Apple, Google and Facebook, have suburban campuses. But in your book, you talk about the advantages of being located in the urban center, like Amazon is in Seattle. Looking to the future, which of these two models—the suburban campus, or the urban headquarters—will prevail?

One hundred percent, urban. It’s like a reverse blast zone: Everyone’s being sucked to the epicenter. Even Facebook has acquiesced. Kids are getting sick of being on these buses from San Francisco and commuting down to Facebook or Google. All of the large tech companies that didn’t have campuses in San Francisco are building them.

With that preference for urban environments, do you think cities like New York or Boston might have an increasing advantage in producing leading tech companies?

New York is going to boom with the introduction of a third world-class university. There’s NYU, there’s Columbia, and now there’s Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. Within a long bike ride of each other you have three of best universities in the nation—and that concentration is intoxicating for companies.

In your book, you extoll Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods as well as Apple’s decision to open stores. Many people are talking about the “retail apocalypse,” but you say having a physical presence is an important advantage for these companies.

The rumors of the death of stores are greatly exaggerated. We’re going through a cyclical, not structural, downsizing in stores, simply because the square footage of malls grew at double the rate of the population from 1970 to 2015. In the United States, we have three times more square footage of retail space than Britain, and 50 percent more than Canada. But the strategic role stores play in a company’s health—its brand health—is only increasing in importance. The decision that created more shareholder value than any decision in the history of business was Apple’s decision to forward integrate into this dying medium called “stores.”

Christian Entrepreneurs

http://www.giantsforgod.com/

https://www.newsmax.com/FastFeatures/christians-business-current-successful/2015/11/02/id/700214/

http://www.lifebydesignco.com/7-inspirational-christian-entrepreneurs

https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/high-profile-christian-business-leaders.aspx

http://www.businesspundit.com/5-influential-christian-business-leaders/

http://www.hearitfirst.com/news/5-christian-business-owners-to-admire

Where Millennials Come From (The New Yorker Article)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/where-millennials-come-from#

Where Millennials Come From

And why we insist on blaming them for it.

By Jia Tolentino

A generation has inherited a world without being able to live in it.

Imagine, as I often do, that our world were to end tomorrow, and that alien researchers many years in the future were tasked with reconstructing the demise of civilization from the news. If they persevered past the coverage of our President, they would soon identify the curious figure of the millennial as a suspect. A composite image would emerge, of a twitchy and phone-addicted pest who eats away at beloved American institutions the way boll weevils feed on crops. Millennials, according to recent headlines, are killing hotels, department stores, chain restaurants, the car industry, the diamond industry, the napkin industry, homeownership, marriage, doorbells, motorcycles, fabric softener, hotel-loyalty programs, casinos, Goldman Sachs, serendipity, and the McDonald’s McWrap. à[Demand Shift: Millennials].

The idea that millennials are capriciously wrecking the landscape of American consumption grants quite a bit of power to a group that is still on the younger side. Born in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, millennials are now in their twenties and thirties. But the popular image of this generation—given its name, in 1987, by William Strauss and Neil Howe—has long been connected with the notion of disruptive self-interest. Over the past decade, that connection has been codified by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, who writes about those younger than herself with an air of pragmatic evenhandedness and an undercurrent of moral alarm. (An article adapted from her most recent book, “iGen,” about the cohort after millennials, was published in the September issue of The Atlantic with the headline “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” It went viral.) In 2006, Twenge published “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before.” The book’s cover emblazoned the title across a bare midriff, a flamboyant illustration of millennial self-importance, sandwiched between a navel piercing and a pair of low-rise jeans.

According to Twenge, millennials are “tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious, but also disengaged, narcissistic, distrustful, and anxious.” She presents a barrage of statistics in support of this assessment, along with anecdotal testimonials and pop-cultural examples that neatly confirm the trends she identifies. (A revised edition, published in 2014, mentions the HBO show “Girls” six times.) Twenge acknowledges that the generation has come of age inside an “economic squeeze created by underemployment and rising costs,” but she mostly explains millennial traits in terms of culture and choice. Parents overemphasized self-esteem and happiness, while kids took their cues from an era of diversity initiatives, decentralized authority, online avatars, and reality TV. As a result, millennials have become irresponsible and fundamentally maladjusted. They “believe that every job will be fulfilling and then can’t even find a boring one.” They must lower their expectations and dim their glittering self-images in order to become functional adults.

This argument has a conservative appeal, given its focus on the individual rather than on the structures and the conditions that govern one’s life. Twenge wonders, “Is the upswing in minority kids’ self-esteem an unmitigated good?” and then observes, “Raising children’s self-esteem is not going to solve the problems of poverty and crime.” It’s possible to reach such moralizing conclusions even if one begins with the opposite economic premise. In “The Vanishing American Adult,” published in May, Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, insists that we live in a time of generalized “affluenza,” in which “much of our stress now flows not from deprivation but, oddly, from surplus.” Millennials have “far too few problems,” he argues. Sasse chastises parents for allowing their kids to succumb to the character-eroding temptations of contemporary abundance and offers suggestions for turning the school-age generation into the sort of hardworking, financially independent grownups that the millennials have yet to become.

The image of millennials has darkened since Strauss and Howe walked the beat: in their 2000 book, “Millennials Rising,” they claimed that the members of this surging generation were uniquely earnest, industrious, and positive. But the decline in that reputation is hardly surprising. Since the nineteen-sixties, most generational analysis has revolved around the groundbreaking idea that young people are selfish. Twenge’s term for millennials merely flips an older one, the “me generation,” inspired by a 1976 New York cover story by Tom Wolfe about the baby boomers. (The voluble Wolfe, born in 1930, is a member of the silent generation.) Wolfe argued that three decades of postwar economic growth had produced a mania for “remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it.” The fear of growing selfishness has, in the forty years since, only increased.

That fear is grounded in concrete changes: the story of American self-interest is a continuous one that nonetheless contains major institutional and economic shifts. Adapting to those shifts does tend to produce certain effects. I was born smack in the middle of the standard millennial range, and Twenge’s description of my generation’s personality strikes me as broadly accurate. Lately, millennial dreams tend less toward global fame and more toward affordable health insurance, but she is correct that my cohort has grown up under the influence of novel and powerful incentives to focus on the self. If for the baby boomers self-actualization was a conscious project, and if for Gen X—born in the sixties and seventies—it was a mandate to be undermined, then for millennials it’s more like an atmospheric condition: inescapable, ordinary, and, perhaps, increasingly toxic. A generation has inherited a world without being able to live in it. How did that happen? And why do so many people insist on blaming them for it?

“Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials,” by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown), is the first major accounting of the millennial generation written by someone who belongs to it. Harris is twenty-eight—the book’s cover announces his birth year next to a sardonic illustration of elementary-school stickers—and he has already rounded the bases of young, literary, leftist media: he is a writer and editor for the online magazine the New Inquiry; he has written for Jacobin and n+1. He got his first taste of notoriety during Occupy Wall Street: shortly after activists settled in at Zuccotti Park, he wrote a blog post for Jacobin in which he claimed to have “heard unconfirmed reports that Radiohead is planning a concert at the occupation this week.” He set up an e-mail account using the name of the band’s manager and wrote to Occupy organizers, conveying the band’s interest in performing. Later, in a piece for Gawker titled “I’m the Jerk Who Pranked Occupy Wall Street,” he explained that his goal was to get more people to the protest, and expressed disdain for the way the organizers responded. (Fooled by his e-mail, they held a press conference and confirmed the band’s plan to appear.)

Harris’s anatomizing of his peers begins with the star stickers that, along with grade-school participation trophies, so fascinate Sasse, Twenge, and other writers of generational trend pieces. “You suck, you still get a trophy” is how Twenge puts it, describing contemporary K through five as an endless awards ceremony. Harris, on the other hand, regards elementary school as a capitalist boot camp, in which children perform unpaid labor, learn the importance of year-over-year growth through standardized testing, and get accustomed to constant, quantified, increasingly efficient work. The two descriptions are not as far apart as one might think: assuring kids that they’re super special—and telling them, as Sasse does, that they have a duty to improve themselves through constant enrichment—is a good way to get them to cleave to a culture of around-the-clock labor. And conditioning them to seek rewards in the form of positive feedback—stars and trophies, hearts and likes—is a great way to get them used to performing that labor for free.

My memories of childhood—in a suburban neighborhood in west Houston that felt newly hatched, as open as farmland—are different, breezy and hot and sunlit. I attended, mostly on scholarship, a Southern Baptist school attached to one of the largest megachurches in America, and elementary school seemed like the natural price of admission for friends, birthday parties, and long summers full of shrieking, unsupervised play. (The very young aren’t much for picking up on indoctrination techniques; the religious agitprop felt natural enough, too.) But some kind of training did kick in around the time I entered high school, when I began spending fourteen-hour days on campus with the understanding that I needed to earn a scholarship to a good college. College, of course, is where the millennial lounges around on lush green quads, spends someone else’s money, insists on “safe spaces,” protests her school’s heteronormative core curriculum, and wages war on her professors if she receives a grade below an A. I did the first two of those things, thanks to the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia. I also took six classes a semester, worked part time, and crammed my schedule with clubs and committees—in between naps on the quad and beers with friends on my porch couch and long meditative sessions figuring out what kind of a person I was going to be.

Most undergraduates don’t have such a luxurious and debt-free experience. The majority of American college students never live on campus; around a third go to community college. The type of millennial that much of the media flocks to—white, rich, thoughtlessly entitled—is largely unrepresentative of what is, in fact, a diverse and often downwardly mobile group. (Millennials are the first generation to have just a fifty-fifty chance of being financially better off than their parents.) Many millennials grew up poor, went to crummy schools, and have been shuttled toward for-profit colleges and minimum-wage jobs, if not the prison system. (For-profit colleges, which disproportionately serve low-income students, account for roughly a tenth of undergraduates, and more than a third of student-loan defaults.) Average student debt has doubled just within this generation, surging from around eighteen thousand dollars at graduation for the class of 2003 to thirty-seven thousand for the class of 2016. (Under the tax plan recently passed by House Republicans, the situation worsens for student borrowers and their families: that bill eliminates the deduction on student-loan interest and voids the income-tax exemption for tuition benefits.)

A young college graduate, having faithfully followed the American path of hard work and achievement, might now find herself in a position akin to a homeowner with negative equity: in possession of an asset that is worth much less than what she owes. In these conditions, the concept of self-interest starts to splinter. For young people, I suspect, the idea of specialness looks like a reward but mostly functions as punishment, bestowing on us the idea that there is no good way of existing other than constantly generating returns.

Harris and I were born in the same year, and we were in college when the financial crisis hit, in 2008. As I approached graduation, I watched news footage of crumple-faced families carrying boxes out of foreclosed houses, followed by shots of expensively dressed professionals walking to work at their bailed-out banks. I joined the Peace Corps, and was assigned to Kyrgyzstan. Shortly after I returned to the U.S., in 2011, the grungy, amorphous Occupy movement started blooming; protesters were railing against the impunity of “the one per cent” in Houston, as they were in dozens of other cities across the country. Suspended in the amber of my temporary underemployment, I spent long afternoons hanging around Hermann Square, downtown, making small talk with libertarian lawyers, pan-activists in bandannas and hiking sandals, and a lot of people in my own demographic—millennials coming into their political discontent.

That September, Occupy set up its makeshift camp in lower Manhattan. On the first day of October, some seven hundred demonstrators were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct as they walked on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge, blocking traffic. Harris was one of them. He argued, along with many others, that the police had led the group onto the bridge and then arrested them. In 2012, as the case was going forward, his Twitter archive was subpoenaed. Twitter resisted the order, but eventually provided the tweets, which made it clear that Harris had heard the police warning protesters to stay off the roadway. (“They tried to stop us,” he’d tweeted.) He was sentenced to six days of community service. These Occupy stories don’t make it into “Kids These Days”—Harris leaves out his personal experience altogether, keen to focus on structural analysis rather than anecdote. He does observe, though, in a discussion of social media, that “Coke tastes good even once you’ve seen what it can do to a rusty nail.” He continues to make frequent use of Twitter.

When Twenge first published “Generation Me,” social media had not yet become ubiquitous. Facebook was limited to colleges and high schools, Twitter hadn’t formally launched, and Instagram didn’t exist. But the millennial narrative was already taking its mature shape, and social media fit into it seamlessly: the narcissism of status updates, the shallow skimming of shiny surfaces, the inability to sit still. One might therefore conclude that the story of generational self-centeredness is so flexible as to have no real definition—it can cover anything, with a little stretching. But there is another possibility: that social media feeds on the same conditions that have made millennials what they are.

“Over the last decade, anxiety has overtaken depression as the most common reason college students seek counseling services,” the Times Magazine noted in October. Anxiety, Harris argues, isn’t just an unfortunate by-product of an era when wages are low and job security is scarce. It’s useful: a constant state of adrenalized agitation can make it hard to stop working and encourage you to think of other aspects of your life—health, leisure, online interaction—as work. Social media provides both an immediate release for that anxiety and a replenishment of it, so that users keep coming back. Many jobs of the sort that allow millennials to make sudden leaps into financial safety—in tech, sports, music, film, “influencing,” and, occasionally, journalism—are identity-based and mercurial, with the biggest payoffs and opportunities going to those who have developed an online following. What’s more, cultivating a “personal brand” has become a matter of prudence as well as ambition: there is a powerful incentive to be publicly likable at a time when strangers routinely rate and review one another over minor transactions—cat-sitting, assembling ikea furniture, sharing a car ride or a spare bedroom—and people are forced to crowdsource money for their medical bills.

Young people have curled around their economic situation “like vines on a trellis,” as Harris puts it. And, when humans learn to think of themselves as assets competing in an unpredictable and punishing market, then millennials—in all their anxious, twitchy, phone-addicted glory—are exactly what you should expect. The disdain that so many people feel for Harris’s and my generation reflects an unease about the forces of deregulation, globalization, and technological acceleration that are transforming everyone’s lives. (It does not seem coincidental that young people would be criticized for being entitled at a time when people are being stripped of their entitlements.) Millennials, in other words, have adjusted too well to the world they grew up in; their perfect synchronization with economic and cultural disruption has been mistaken for the source of the disruption itself.

This idea runs parallel, in some ways, to the assessments of Twenge and Sasse and other conservative commentators. But Harris’s conclusions are precisely the opposite of theirs: instead of accommodating the situation even further, he argues, kids should revolt. “Either we continue the trends we’ve been given and enact the bad future, or we refuse it and cut the knot of trend lines that defines our collectivity. We become fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.” It’s a near-apocalyptic vision. But the polarization that permeates American politics—stemming, in part, from a sense that extreme measures are necessary to render our world livable—is especially evident among millennials, some disaffected portion of whom form much of the racist alt-right, while a largerswath has adopted the leftist politics shared by Harris. In the 2016 Presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders won more young votes than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined.

“The newfound popularity of socialism among millennials is an alarming trend,” Sasse writes in “The Vanishing American Adult.” He provides a syllabus that he hopes will steer people away from such thinking, and toward an intellectually mature adulthood, and he dutifully includes “The Communist Manifesto,” so that his hypothetical pupils can properly grasp how wrong it is. It seems more likely that a young person who opened “The Communist Manifesto” tomorrow would underline the part about personal worth being reduced to exchange value and go off to join the Democratic Socialists of America, which has grown fivefold in the last year. One of its members, a Marine Corps veteran named Lee Carter, was elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates in November. He was born in 1987. “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” the critic and theorist Fredric Jameson wrote, fourteen years ago. These days, the kids find it easy enough to imagine both. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017, issue, with the headline “Killing It.”

Where Millennials are moving

http://time.com/4797956/cities-millennials-moving/

Rank	Urban Area	Millennial Change 2010-2015 (%)	Millennial Change 2010-2015 (#)
1	Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC	16.4%	7,034
2	Richmond, VA	14.9%	5,176
3	Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA	11.7%	1,014
4	Memphis, TN-MS-AR	9.5%	1,714
5	New Orleans-Metairie, LA	8.5%	5,199
6	Austin-Round Rock, TX	6.6%	4,523
7	Pittsburgh, PA	6.6%	4,177
8	Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD	6.5%	7,740
9	Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH	6.5%	15,549
10	Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL	6.4%	9,633
11	Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD	6.2%	14,383
12	Buffalo-Cheektowaga-Niagara Falls, NY	6.0%	1,881
13	San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX	5.4%	3,665
14	Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	5.2%	4,242
15	Salt Lake City, UT	4.8%	1,983
16	Raleigh, NC	4.2%	677
17	Jacksonville, FL	4.0%	1,112
18	Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC	4.0%	1,372
19	Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX	3.9%	5,905
20	Providence-Warwick, RI-MA	3.8%	2,355
21	Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL	3.6%	2,171
22	Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	3.4%	7,289
23	Columbus, OH	3.2%	1,606
24	Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV	2.9%	2,372
25	New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA	2.5%	29,774

Source: RCLCO

Where Millennials are buying homes

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2017/10/07/where-millennials-moving-answer-may-surprise-you/734212001/

Jeff Bezos & Amazon in 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cTjhzSgdwE

Walmart

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-rivals-walmart-best-buy-target-boost-spending-e-commerce-shipping-challenge-seattle-tech-giant/

At Walmart, e-commerce net sales increased 50 percent over this time last year. Walmart now has online grocery at more than 1,100 stores, with plans to bring it to another 1,000 stores over the next year.

Walmart recently launched an ecommerce marketplace and online grocery operation in Mexico as well. Walmart executives said the company’s priorities going forward will be focused more on digital initiatives than brick and mortar expansion.

“In terms of capital allocation, we’re prioritizing eCommerce, technology, supply chain and store remodels over new stores and clubs, which we believe will contribute to long-term value creation for shareholders,” Walmart Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs said on a call with investors.

Staffing

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bersin-by-deloitte-us-spending-on-recruitment-rises-driven-by-increased-competition-for-critical-talent-300070986.html

"At a cost of nearly $4,000 on average to fill an open position, U.S. companies are spending nearly three times the amount spent on training per employee," said Karen O'Leonard, vice president, Benchmarking & Analytics Research, Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP. "As the economy continues to rebound and the job market becomes more transparent than ever, organizations recognize that spending money strategically on recruitment, employment branding, sourcing and the entire candidate experience is critically important."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 20-24% of Americans change jobs every year (ADP global research says it's 27%), which means more than 41 million people are searching for jobs and being recruited into jobs every single year (in the US alone).

Several billions of dollars are spent on job advertising (Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and others compete for this market) and even after people apply, companies on average spend approximately $4,000 per candidate on interviewing, scheduling, and assessment to decide if someone is right for a job. We estimate that the entire recruitment market is over $200 billion worldwide, and nearly every employer is a participant.

For job seekers, the search process can be agonizing, difficult, and frightening. Unlike other searches on the internet, a job search is a very personal thing. You are looking for a position that fits your needs, a job with a company that fits your personality and lifestyle, and an employer that is physically close enough that you can commute or relocate without impacting your family and daily life. All these search "criteria" are important, and almost none of this information is embedded in the job description.

While companies like Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, and others try to give companies branded pages to promote their company culture and wonderful workplaces, most job descriptions are limited, out of date, and often poorly written - making it hard to tell whether the job is quite what you want.

And thanks to all the myriad of different job titles companies use (there really are no standards), search engines are problematic. Google has been studying this problem and found that for any given job (e.g., Marketing Manager) there are hundreds of different job titles (“Marketing Manager,” “Digital Marketing Manager,” “Marketing Specialist Level 2 ,” and on and on), often making searches inaccurate or misleading.For technical jobs (specialized engineers, scientists, manufacturing staff, and even truck drivers) job titles are even more "non-standard." Google research found that you can search for a simply job like "truck driver" and find that the results obtained in FedEx, UPS, and other delivery services are totally different. They each use different language to describe that very job, so you have to spend a lot of time search each company's website to find the job you want. Which of course makes it nearly impossible.

Behind all this mess is the marketplace of applicant tracking systems (the corporate software that companies use to post jobs, manage applicants, schedule interviews, etc.). These products are generally old and their search and scoring engines are fairly rudimentary, so all these non-standard jobs on the internet are not only hard for people to search, they are hard to match to candidates. So just as candidates often randomly apply for jobs that aren't a great fit, the ATS has a very difficult time scoring resumes to decide who to call back.

The bottom line is a lot of headaches and inefficiency in the job market: the average open position receives more than 150 resumes, more than 45% of candidates never hear anything back from the employer, 83% of candidates rate their job search experience poor, and employers still tell us anecdotally that 20-25% of their candidates don't turn out to be a good long term fit.

If you look at the data collected by the Talent Board on the candidate experience, you find that more than 1/3 of all job seekers spend 2 or more hours researching a single job, it often then takes them an hour to complete the job application, and more than half rate the search process poor or mediocre. We are creating a lot of pain, effort, and complexity for job seekers everywhere.

Enter Google.

I won't give you the history of the Google Jobs API team (it's an interesting history), but some very smart people at Google have been looking at this market for a few years. They realized that the entire taxonomy of jobs is a mess, so one of the things they have been doing is building a "job family taxonomy" that aggregates similar job titles into families of jobs to build a truly useful, searchable, "universe" of jobs, organized by discipline and functional domain. This alone is an enormous undertaking, and one that could benefit our economy and society if it works well.

Google for Jobs Documentation

As the team has been building this out, they started using the taxonomy and search algorithms (it also uses Google's Natural Language Processing algorithms to read job descriptions and find out that "truck driver" and "delivery manager" are the same job) across millions of jobs to train the algorithm over time. Their experimental work with early customers has been fairly amazing: one client found that searches for "genetic engineering research" jobs barely surfaced a single job before using the Google technology; after using the Google search the perfect job popped up in the first page.

Remember that Google is quite expert at understanding your search terms, keeping track of all the searches done in the past to get smarter, and then using smart NLP algorithms to decompose your search into a meaningful query and then pull back the best possible result. This is what Google has done for its entire life, so applying it to job search is a natural thing.

Under the covers of this new job taxonomy is an engine that tries to understand a job through it skills. As the chart below shows (read Google documentation for more), the engine actually reads through job descriptions and tries to find the job you're looking for - rather than just look at the title (which is what most job searches do). Believe me, this results in a far better search experience.

Google Skill Taxonomy

Finding the right employee is one of the most important tasks in business (one might argue it is the most important thing managers do). Yet 61% of top executives surveyed in the Deloitte Human Capital Trends survey told us their companies do not do it well. So if Google can make job sites better, make the candidate search process more accurate, and give us all better data about what good jobs are available in our location, many problems can be solved.

And this problem is getting worse. Our research with Burning-Glass Technologies shows that the jobs of today are shifting away from static "jobs" to "roles," with much more of a hybrid nature. These new "hybrid jobs" (Ie. IOT engineer, digital marketing experience manager, etc.) do not lend themselves to static job descriptions and simple job titles. They are jobs that require technical, industry, managerial, and integrated thinking skills; they often require skills in communication, persuasion, and teamwork. So more than 2/3 of companies now use job-based assessments (particular games or tests which simulate the job itself) and culture assessments to find the best candidates.

Just as Google continues to improve its search capability for restaurants to be "smarter," using data like location, similar searches you've performed, and demographic data about you, so can Google do the same for jobs. One of the features in the Google Jobs project is to search by "commute time." Rather than look for a job within a certain number of miles from your home, Google can use Google maps data to tell you precisely how long it will take you to get to this job.

Imagine, for example, searching for "second line manager jobs in my profession which need my type of experience that are within a 30 minute commute of my home." This is the type of search that will become possible with Google's technology.

There is also enormous revenue potential for highly targeted job advertisements. Imagine an employer that buys a job ad that targets professionals with a certain level of experience in a certain city who have worked for a certain company. While Google may not have all that data in your profile, much of it is discoverable on the internet so one could imagine Google's search engine (an ads) to get very smart over time.

A Potential Benefit to the Economy

Imagine if people could find jobs faster with a better fit. Imagine if employers got fewer, more appropriate candidates. Imagine if data about what jobs are "most in demand" was easy to find. The program Google has undertaken has the potential to increase economic growth, personal career flexibility, and business productivity for many organizations.

The problem is still daunting, and I know Google still has work to do. But the team working on this project is very passionate and experienced, and already their work is starting to show off. I, for one, will watch the Google Jobs project with great anticipation because I think its potential for all of us is tremendous.

Josh Bersin is a leading analyst in HR, talent, leadership, and HR technology. He is also founder and Principal of Bersin by Deloitte.

Biggest Industries in the US

http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-are-the-biggest-industries-in-the-united-states.html

The United States is a world economic powerhouse with the largest nominal GDP in the world, valued at 18.46 trillion dollars which translate to 22% of the world’s nominal GDP. The economy of the United States is divided into three broad categories including the service sector, the manufacturing sector, and the agricultural sector.

Which Are The Biggest Industries In The United States?

Rank	Industry	GDP value added (in $ billions), 2011	% of total GDP
1	Real estate, renting, leasing	1,898	13%
2	State and Local Government	1,336	9%
3	Finance and insurance	1,159	8%
4	Health/social care	1,136	8%
5	Durable manufacturing	910	6%
6	Retail trade	905	6%
7	Wholesale trade	845	6%
8	Non-durable manufacturing	821	6%
9	Federal Government	658	5%
10	Information	646	4%
11	Arts, entertainment	591	4%
12	Construction	529	4%
13	Waste services	448	3%
14	Other services	447	3%
15	Utilities	297	2%
16	Mining	290	2%
17	Corporate management	284	2%
18	Education services	174	1%
19	Agriculture	173	1%

http://bluewatercredit.com/ranking-biggest-industries-us-economy-surprise-1/

10 Most profitable industries in the United States economy:

10. Advertising & Marketing

$8.3 billion revenue last year for the 468 top advertising and marketing companies, showing that promoting and selling things can be just as lucrative as manufacturing them.

9. Construction

Home building is back again after getting walloped during the last recession, and 232 of the biggest 232 builders, contractors, and electrical companies took home $8.34 billion in sales last year.

8. Financial Services

The most prominent 246 financial companies, banks, investment firms, etc. combined for $11.8 billion in revenues last year.

7. Energy

$12.4 billion

The U.S. energy market remains dynamic, with just 100 front running firms earning $12.4 billion in revenues last year, led by XOOM Energy out of North Carolina.

6. Human Resources

The top 203 human resources companies cashed in on $13 billion profits last year, thanks to the fact that companies invested heavily in corporate training with a 15% increase from the previous year.

5. Consumer Products & Services

While this is a broad category, the top 226 companies brought home $14.4 billion last year, with some pretty cool innovations.

4. Logistics & Transportation

$15.2 billion

Getting from Point A to Point B may not be sexy, but it sure is profitable, with the top 157 transportation or logistics firms earning $15.2 revenue last year.

3. Business Products & Services

Encompassing just about every role you could imagine from building mobile apps to wholesaling to restaurants, this sector saw $15.9 billion in profits last year.

2. IT Services

While information tech and services is #10 on the list of biggest industries in the U.S., it ranks #2 overall in profits, with a stunning $17.5 billion in profits last year, led by companies like TRYFACTA, which provides cloud, big data, and IT services.

1. Health

Pharmaceutical manufacturing and sales, genetic testing, workplace drug testing, and all of the hospitals and medical services in the U.S. totaled $24.4 billion in revenues last year, making it the most profitable sector of our economy!

We now know which industries are the biggest and bring in the most total revenue, but which specific fields are lean and mean, earning the highest net margins?

10 U.S. Industries with the highest net margins:

10. Major banks

22.9% net margins last year

9. Regional banks

23% net margins last year

8. IT services

24% net margins last year

7. Savings banks

24% net margins last year

6. Biotechnology

24.6% net margins last year

5. Internet software/services

25% net margins last year

4. Major pharmaceutical companies

25.5% net margins last year

3. Tobacco

27.2% net margins last year

2. Investment managers

29.1% net margins last year

1. Generic pharmaceutical companies

30% net margins last year